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Chap.'XrL Copyright No»_. 
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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



MISTS OF FIRE 



MISTS OF FIRE 

A Trilogy 



AND SOME ECLOGS 



By Coates Kinney 




Chicago and New York: 
RAND, McNALLY & CO., PUBLISHERS. 

MDCCCXCIX. 



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46656 

Copyright, 1899, by Rand, McNally & Co. 



8EC0ND COPY, 






CONTENTS 



MISTS OF FIRE. 

PAGE 

Kapnisma, 7 

Pessim and Optim, 63 

A Keen Swift Spirit, 89 

SOME ECLOGS. 

Rain on the Roof, . 117 

Singing Flame, 120 

Vesuvius, 123 

The Sea-Power, 127 

The Woodbird, 129 

Our Only Day, 132 

Ohio Centennial Ode, 134 

The Last Meeting, 141 

Child Lost, 142 

Mars — August 1892, 144 

The Shadow, . . ... . . . 146 

Old Glory, 148 

Cygni Carmen Morituri, 151 

Sea-Sonnets Toward Italy, 153 

Old Virginia, 157 

The End of the Rainbow, 160 

Is Life Worth Living? 163 

The Haunting Voice, 165 

Consummation, . . . ... . . .167 

Essays in Literal Translation of Homeric Meters, 171 



vi CONTENTS. 

PAGE. 

My Lord, 177 

A Bird's Autumn Lyric, 179 

The Shibboleth, 181 

Threnody, 187 

Victrice, 188 

In Oberon, 192 

ISLE-OF-WlLLOWS, 204 

The American Citizen, . . . . . . 205 

Madonna, 207 

The Land Redeemed, 209 

Duty Here and Glory There, . . . . 212 

Remember the Maine, 214 

The Thought and the Word, . . . . 216 

Love in the Sugar-Camp, 217 

Aspiration and Inspiration, 220 

Innervale, 223 

Ships Coming In, 225 

Alone, 228 

Nearing the Brink, 231 



The apostrophe to an old appletree in "Mists of Fire" and the 
poems " Singing Flame" and " Our Only Day" are from Harpers' 
Magazine by permission. 



MISTS OF FIRE. 

A Trilogy. 



■far 



He whirled in mists of fire and knew that time 
Would make his nebula stand forth a star. 

p. 10. 



KAPNISMA. 

ovpavbv ikbv k\i66ouivrj nepi Kaitvoo. 

Iliad I. 317. 

I. 

The south sun's molten beam of morning, poured 
Slant through my window, casts a golden bar 

Along here by me, which I musing tow'rd 
Mottle with blue smoke blown from my cigar. 

May sun in mid-November! and the purr 
Of one demure flame puttering in the grate 

Is of the season sole remembrancer: 
Which is it, sun or flame, befits my state ? 



8 MISTS OF FIRE. 

My state of age is as the waning year, 
But still my spirit seems yon sun of gold ; 

Xor can I make the thin flame lurking here 
Seem life's armed watch against the final cold. 

Yet when I duly think I needs must know 

That this mistimed resplendence can not last ; 

Soon shall I cuddle to my firelight's glow, 
And only dream therein the radiant past. 

Why, then, should I sit idly dreaming now ? 

Wherefore not strive to seize the shining day 
And ray it to a nimbus round my brow 

For pride and praise when I have passed away ? 

But pride in what, forsooth, and praise from whom ? 

What could the plausive breath of millions be, 
Or fame's procrastined flattery on a tomb, 

After the darkness has gone over me? 

Yet, be it vanity or be it art 

Yearning for utterance, I seem to feel 

A very Sinai thundering in my heart 
To make the multitude in worship kneel. 



KAPNISMA. 9 

Not, surely, to exalt me as a name, 

But as a mandatary chosen of God: 
Death on the hight at last with Him is fame, 

The good land spied whereto His people plod. 

There is no glory worth a moment's thought 
Save that which links the memory of a man 

To some fair order out of chaos wrought 
By him creating on creation's plan. 

His work it is that lifts the human life : 

While others lead by law's and battle's might 

He rises into calm above the strife 

And sets new guiding-stars along the night. 

Though to the vision of his time and race 

Be only darkness where his far thoughts fly, 

Yet, looking through himself, he well may trace 
The constellation men shall know him by. 

How doubt that Shakespeare, measurer of worth, 
Gaged his own measure ? Was that splendor dim 

Which should outsplendor all the names of earth, 
Was that, now dazzling us, obscure to him? 



10 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Did he all realms of human thought explore 
And search all nature to its heart of fire, 

Yet* his own majesty of man ignore 

In London playwright and in Stratford squire? 

Xay. though he lavished radiance like the sun, 
He knew the world would roll round to his shine, 

And sat serene to let the centuries run 

Till all their summits took his dawn divine. 

He needed not his generation's praise 

For merit higher than their ken could prize, 

Contented to forefeel the coming days 
When he should fill the more expanded skies. 

So Brownine: issuing from out sublime 
Regions beyond the measured cosmos, far 

He whirled in mists of nre. and knew that time 
Would make his nebula stand forth a star. 

But not so all : there are fine natures, new 
To this bleak oldness of the world, that need 

The balm of bland south winds, and sun, and dew 
To fetch them into flower of word or deed. 



KAPNISMA. 11 

Such see not in their dreams their destinies, 

But doubt, and woo sleep to confirm their 
dreams, 

Turning from test of that which in them is 

To trust of that which round them only seems. 

To them the Present's flattery is breath 
Of life, and by the fashion of the hour 

And by the Past's rescriptive shibboleth 

They measure all the growing Future's power. 

Their souls endeavor not against rebuff, 

But up the sunshine softly drift, and thin, 

And vanish ; as the smoke I gently puff 
Along the beam here past me slanting in. 

Our sky is one vast empty bubble blown 
Full of such promise of forgotten men ; — 

Nay, them that are in streams of stars upflown, 
Millions of them, we never name again. 

Yet these have fixed their glimmers ; they shall last 

With those whose larger gleams the night be- 
gem; 
They stand the steadfast presence of the past, 
And time forevermore looks up to them. 



12 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Even thus to give light, though no name of it 
Were known on earth, is glory worth the aim ; 

But O in forefront of the heavens to sit, 
A titled immortality of flame ! 

Call it ambition, call it worldly pride, 
Defiance of the faith, of wisdom scorn — 

The soul's high sun-dream of life's other side, 
It is keen Phosphor looking to the morn. 

It is a testimony, though a doubt : 

Our longing props our Heaven of prayer and 
song, 

Yet we are loath to lose ourselves from out 

These wraiths of memory that to earth belong. 

Were we as sure of that new life beyond 
As faith would keep us did we well believe, 

Who would so closely hug this fleshly bond, 
Or to memorials here so fondly cleave? 

What should the rapt souls in a world of bliss, 
From ardor there to heavenly ardor whirled, 

Care for the little life they loved in this, 
Or for remembrance in this little world? 



KAPNISMA. 13 

It is the feeble faith which supplicates, 

"Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief/' 

That wavers in its claim to both estates, 
And dies contesting for the lower fief. 

But is it lower? Why not instinct guess 

The evolution of the brain and give 
Forecast of Universal Consciousness, 

Wherein all souls of all the past shall live ? 

What surer future can the Faith affirm 

For spirit than that All-Intelligence 

Shall memorize itself from bloom to germ 

And trace its own growth back through every 
sense ? 

Since we are not to live hereafter by the flesh, 

But only by the spirit, what is that 
Other than this life's memories to refresh 

In some new life, in some new habitat ? 

And if One Mind contains the universe 
As all-involving essence, it shall sum 

Together these our memories and rehearse 
Them as One Memory in some world to come. 



14 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Man's rising in such Memory is the soul 
This is the soul, or else the soul is not : 

To be a mind so recollected whole 
Is life, as it is death to be forgot. 



Not strange, then, is it that our nature strives, 
In spite of other faiths' imaginings, 

To reach the hight of memorable lives 
With heavenward flutters of terrestrial wings. 

The keenest pang of dying is the dread 

That ere our green graves' tiny billows sink 

Back to the calm of some old churchyard's bed 
Men will have ceased to speak of us or think. 

But, ah me, when the plowman drives his share 
Along the level sward above our sleep, 

And, even of our oblivion unaware, 

Upturns our mold to sow therein and reap ! 

Shall we grow into food to feed our kind — 
Our grosser part their grosser nature build — 

And yet our Substance, mind, from out the mind 
Of all Humanity be struck and killed? 



KAPNISMA. 15 

Not so ! As these my wafted breaths of smoke, 
Although they vanish, can not perish, thus 

Not even Omnipotence has thunderstroke 
Potent enough to slay the souls of us. 

This mind, even as this matter, element 

All indestructible though suffering strange 

Vicissitudes, shall be forever blent 

With its Great Integer through every change. 

Doubtless the souls of most must be but small, 
Since little lives give little to record ; 

But, lo, there doth not any sparrow fall 
Without the recognition of the Lord. 



* 



Now suddenly, as here I muse and grope 

Amid the mysteries, I hear the quick 

Sharp shocks of parting time's farewell to hope — 

Time dropping through my old clock tick by 
tick! 

O time ! time, miracle of mystery too ! 

When life from full orb has begun to wane, 
Like dreams that brush a baby's slumber through, 

The old years drowse and dwindle in the brain. 



16 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Between a thought and thought or act and act 

The longer, oftener oblivion gaps, 
The more the circlings of the world contract; 

And time is not time in the interlapse. 

Yet time, too, ends not when our reason dotes 
Amid the measured wheelings of the spheres ; 

Imperishable matter still connotes 

These massive motions which are days and years. 

But think how, when the reckoning brain is gone 
Back to blind atoms of the earth and air — 

Though yet these motions — how can time go on 
Without our sentiency of when and where ! 

Mere motions that the sleep of death have crossed 

Are not duration, and do not exist: 
So myriads of ages might be lost 

Out of eternity and not be missed. 

And that is solace. Though there intervene 

Eons on eons ere the dead awake, 
A lightning's-flash shall be the time between 

The conscious life they leave and that they take. 



KAPN1SMA. 17 

Life is by atoms : when it has impinged 

On every atom of the cosmic mass 
And all that Body with the Spirit tinged, 

Then Universal Soul has come to pass. 

An atom that has lived can never lose 

The vital impress, but with kindred swarms, 

In ways heredity or chance may choose, 
Must reassert its life in other forms. 

Thus atoms that alive have livest force 
Are such as most their parentage reflect: 

So shall at length they all declare their source 
And all their past revive and recollect. 

They into forms of living reconstruct 

The past of matter, flesh and blood re-wrought ; 
Why should imagination, then, reluct 

At reconstruction of the past of thought ? 

Imagination! she must govern still: 

Creatrix of the sciences and faiths, 
Our shimmering skies she fills with worlds at will, 

And skies beyond with paradise of wraiths. 



18 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Shall she geometrize across abysms 

Between stars — ay, explore the stars them- 
selves — 

Yet here grope darkling in old mysticisms, 
Turning from seraphim to dance with elves ? 

Imagination, this consummate blowth 

Of all the faculties, once being rid 
Of ignorance and superstition both, 

Shall search all secrets and all mazes thrid. 

I hold that man shall sometime understand 
The origins from which his being sprung, 

And know himself back to beginnings planned 
In Nature's matrix when herself was young. 

Into his memory shall he, imaging 

Life's radial lines from his own center back, 

So all precursors of his selfhood bring 
That they no attribute of soul shall lack. 

Incredible? Impossible? Absurd? 

Smoke on the brain ? But what stands farther off 
From reason than the life, unseen, unheard, 

Which Faith avers, in spite of Reason's scoff. 



KAPNISMA. 19 

Imagination to religion raised 
And out of clouds of old tradition flashed 

Delivers thunder, and our reason dazed 
In reverence and marvel shrinks abashed. 

But shall Imagination now forget 

Her faculty of miracles, and down 
Before Reality's dull coronet 

Of bronze and iron cast her golden crown ? 

Nay ! she is Iris, and the cloudy dark 
That science shuts against the heavenward eye 

Of spirit she illumines with her arc 

Of colors caught from white light of the sky. 

There is much more to know than Reason knows, 
Much more to find than Science yet has found ; 

And whither winged Imagination goes 

They well may follow, fluttering from the ground. 

She is the Flying-Spirit, and her trust 

Is in the yet unknowable which yawns 

In thought's blank skywardness ; and soar she 
must 

There lark- wise into high and higher dawns. 



20 MISTS OF FIRE. 

And if she here has intimated truth, 

Shall these her utterances to mockery move 

For that there is no proof of them, forsooth ? 
The highest truths are those we can not prove. 

Such mother thoughts may be as axioms 

To mathematics in that riper age 
When mind through late-born intuition comes 

Into the fullness of its heritage. 

Instinct of that it is within us burns 
As fever for more living and as thirst 

To be more known and knowing, and that yearns 
To stand in man's regard as best and first. 

The more we live, the more our living urge 
Upon the life around us, by so much 

More nimbly shall our future selves emerge 
From atoms that have felt our vital touch. 

And whosoever here has lived his best 
To others, by his mind in theirs expansed 

And by their memory thus of him possessed, 
Is nigher unto risen soul advanced. 



KAPNISMA. 21 

The golden rule of Christ, then, is engraved 
On nature's heart ; to do our kind most good 

Is most by their remembrance to be saved 
As spirit in their coming spirithood. 



O selfish soul of me ! the thought thou knowst 
As duty to the neighbor shall be warmed 

With the quick comfort of the Holy Ghost, 
And heaven shall catch thee in the good per- 
formed. 



But what is good ? — grand question that has tasked 
All time's best wisdom, and yet rests involved 

With 'What is truth ?' the question Pilate asked 
Of Jesus, nor without it shall be solved. 

Jesus was silent ; let the Roman law 

Declare his answer from the Roman cross — 

And ruled Rome, though his dying vision saw 
Round him the Caesar's brazen eagles toss. 

His good was life that all men's hearts applaud, 
His truth was innocence' victorious death : 

In three days both arose and walked abroad, 
To fill Rome and the world with Nazareth. 



:: MISTS OF FIRE. 

Disciples, clouds of witnesses, evince 

Their knowledge of him, how that still he stirs 

Their life and lives in them ; and millions since 
His death have gone to theirs his worshipers. 

Men mark his sovereignty by spire and dome. 
And throne him in the skies with seraphim. 

But when they seek aright his very home, 
In their own souls they find the soul of him. 

The more men live the Christ, the more the Christ 
Shall grow to person in his Christendom ; 

The slow world, meager-virtued, many-viced, 
Shall yet at length roll to his kingdom come. 

He was the fair first-fruits of them that slept ; 

And when all wake to him his prophe:; 
Shall be fulfilled on earth, his promise kept — 

Humanity- shall be Christianity. 

Bis second coming in the flesh is pang 

Of birth of freedom in the throes of war — 

Peace whispered where mad revolutions rang, 
And question what mankind are living for. 



KAPNISMA. 23 

His coming in all flesh is slow and hard ; 

But nature works without despair or scorn: 
Though sin resist it and though wrong retard, 

Christ surely shall again as Man be born — 

As Man in all men one — all then redeemed 
To him — as Man that aye himself renews, 

And not, as Simon son of Jonas dreamed, 
Deliverer from Rome and King of Jews ; 

Nor yet as apparition in the clouds 
With blare of trump and loud angelic cry 

Along the heavens' arch, summoning the crowds 
Of quick and dead to judgment in the sky. 

His life by many thousand years foretook 
The growth of men ; who only now begin 

To read the secrets of the sacred book 
The largeness of his soul was written in. 

The childlike marvels which have made the half 
Of him in worship (leveled to the brain 

Of child-folk) shall be winnowed out as chaff 
Is winnowed to the winds from golden grain. 



24 MISTS OF FIRE. ' 

And to and fro shall run and be increased 
The truth which was himself ; that shall be he 

Whom all men, from the greatest to the least, 
Shall feel and know ; that all in all shall be. 



II. 



But what is goodness? Is it selfishness? 

How vainly questioned! Duty understood 
Waits outdoors in the snow and under stress 

Of winds of winter, and I dream it good 

Again here, in my fire's caressing hold, 
To watch my fancies as in smoke they float 

About my chamber's mellow glow of gold 

Or stop and swirl, sucked up the * chimney's 
throat. 

Too precious in the brain my life has grown ; 

And the left moments of it look so scarce and 
small 
That I no more can bear to see them sown 

Like seed afield, lest they unfertile fall. 



KAPNISMA. 25 

But who would save his life shall lose it ! Yea, 
I know — the treasure that is buried gives 

No increase — and I know there comes a day 
When each shall answer for the life he lives. 

Yet so I love my world — this world of thought, 
This business of my dreams, this drowse in books 

Over the lore of life the dead have taught — 
That all my selfhood shrinks from outward looks. 

My selfhood, ay and selfishness, it is — 
The German Goethe's yearning to absorb 

More life, without that Sungod's-thirst of his 
To drain the light from every starry orb. 

The egotism of culture was his cult — 
Worship of self with others' sacrifice ; 

And can it be that such supreme result 

Commends the priest through whom the victim 
dies? 

From Jesus down to Goethe— down or up ! — 
Between the thought Semitic and the Greek, 

The soul asks, shall compassion drink the cup, 
Or passion pour it for the lowly weak ? 



26 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Was that an answer that a night-wind spoke ? 

From out the dark methought I heard a cry 
Of human sorrow, and the very smoke 

Here seemed to shudder as the moan went by. 

Was it the pity of the cruel night, 

Its wail of pity even for whom it slays? 

And shall I snug here to the warmth and light, 
While misery in the cold and darkness prays? 

Yet what do I amiss — wherein have sinned? 

Can I lift all the downtrod, all the frail 
Save from temptation ? Why dost, then, O wind, 

Embitter me with thy rebuking wail? 

What can a single soldier on the field 

Of battle, in the din of drums and yell 

Of onset, when the shocked battalions yield, 

Torn through with thunder-scath of shot and 
shell? 

What blame if in the rout of foot and horse 
He save himself and tarry not to ease 

The dying or fetch off a comrade's corse — 
What blame to him that for his life he flees? 



KAPNISMA. 27 

So, in the horror round us — cries and groans — 

The weak struck down — the fight gone over 
them — 

The cruel victors' shouts — the women's moans! — 

O night-wind, how should I the conflict stem ? 

Besides, does not our later science teach 

That by the havoc of the weak the strong 

Are strengthened— that the fittest cannot reach 

And hold their right without such seeming 
wrong ? 

Behold the ravage of the carnivores ! 

They torture one another and devour ; 
And instinct that the victim's pain ignores 

Is the sole warrant of their life and power. 

Lift off the night wherever round the globe, 
What tragedies of violence unveiled! 

Light up the seas and their abysses probe, 

Lo, slaughter sworded and huge murder mailed ! 

Nature is heartless. But if human will 

And human conscience raise not man above 

Her tests, whence is it that Thou shalt not kill/ 
Or, Thou thy neighbor as thyself shalt love V 



28 MISTS OF FIRE. 

The human will and conscience! worlds that wheel 
Around some Sun beyond cur scheme of things : 

Their orbits touch this nature, but reveal 
Not whence the higher gravitation springs. 

We must not plead the instinct of the brute 

To justify the human soul in sin : 
The darkness of the ground, which fats the root, 

Rules not the light the blossom rises in. 

The law which pricked the fratricidal Cain 
To cry, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' damns 

The slayer, nay condemns even him who fain 
Would shirk the Christ's injunction, Teed my 
lambs/ 



What is this? Is it Evolution's law 

Of self for self? Then, that which I call Me 

Feels supernatural attractions draw 
Toward a grander Self that is to be. 

The more the human consciousness expands 
The more it thrills with others' pleasure, as 

The more their pain it feels and understands, 
And thus takes more life to the life it has. 



KAPNISMA. 29 

So self grows larger ; for it is the life. 

So self grows nobler with its range more wide. 
Self still shall seek its own — its own in strife 

By fellow-feeling to be magnified. 

Each of the million million sparks that star 
This darkness is a separate centered sun; 

The Sun to rise shall overshine them far, 
And mingle all their shinings in its one. 

Through ways of selfishness all nature moves 
Unto a destiny unknown and strange ; 

To this each selfhood runs along its grooves 
Of circumstance in time and change. 

Our very will is tethered to the ground. 

We cannot fly. The air we breathe is fate. 
The food that cherishes our life we found 

Predestined here to appetite innate. 

Free will ! Free to be well, and good, and glad, 
In bodies of born sin and sorrow cramped ! 

Free to be sane though we were fathered mad ! 
Free will ! with shackles of tradition clamped ! 



30 MISTS OF FIRE. 

It was my grandsire reaching from his grave 
That pulled me back to darkness when I willed 

An utterance of light and was not brave 

Enough to word the thought with which I 
thrilled. 

A million voices from ancestral tombs, 
A million forces round me in the air, 

Control my nature, and a million looms 
Have woven this life-vesture w T hich I wear. 



I am obedient to all the powers 

Of universal being ; for I go 
Back to its roots, as forward to its flowers 

I shall, through all its bole and branches, grow, 

Is will, then, naught ? Nay ; though it is a pull 

Against all gravity, it is a lift 
Of all so much ; and one will, dutiful, 

May even the center of attraction shift. 

Giordano Bruno, in the flames at Rome, 
In Campo Fiora, that day ere the fire 

Of Holy Inquisition burned him home 
To God, when with the awful Triune ire 



KAPNISMA. 31 

Of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost the Church 
Had cursed him and now held before his eyes 

The mocking crucifix, forsooth to search 
His conscience with that sign of sacrifice — 

Giordano Bruno turned away his face 
And would not see the desecrated sign, 

But rather on his eyeballs took the grace 
Of blasting flames — and saw the light divine. 

He saw, or sees, or shall see; for no past, 
Present, or future comes for him between 

That death-flash and the dawn which is at last 
To wake the Nolan with the Nazarene. 

Was that will nothing? Nay! it jogged the world 
And fetched its pole back to the north-star. 
Now, 

Where then her flames above his ashes whirled, 
St. Peter's to his monument must bow. 

The rack, the scaffold, and the fire attest 

The martyr's weight against the world of man : 

One will, truth-armed, may clip the tyrant's crest 
Or tame the thunders of the Vatican. 



32 MISTS OF FIRE. 

The Great Republic bred her free-born sons 
To smother conscience in the coward's hush, 

And had to have a freedom-champion's 

Blood sprinkled in her face to make her blush. 

One Will became a passion to avenge 

Her shame — a fury consecrate and weird, 

As if the old religion of Stonehenge 

Amid our weakling worships re-appeared. 

It was a drawn sword of Jehovah's wrath, 

Two-edged and flaming, waved back to a host 

Of mighty shadows gathering on its path, 
Soon to emerge as soldiers, when the ghost 

Of John Brown should the lines of battle form. 
When John Brown crossed the Nation's Rubi- 
con, 
Him Freedom followed in the battle-storm, 

And John Brown's soul in song went marching 
on. 

Though John Brown's body lay beneath the sod, 
His soul released the winds and loosed the flood : 

The Nation wrought his will as hest of God, 
And her bloodguiltiness atoned with blood. 



KAPNISMA. 33 

The world may censure and the world regret: 
The present wrath becomes the future ruth ; 

For stern old History does not forget 
The man who flings his life away for truth. 



In the far time to come, when it shall irk 
The schoolboy to recite our Presidents' 

Dull line of memorabilia, John Brown's work 
Shall thrill him through from all the elements. 

Only his will is free that has been freed 

From dread of death. That terror holds us bond. 

We hoard the life here with a miser's greed, 
Grudging to spend it for a life beyond. 

Naught of his own whereon man sets his heart — 
Love, fortune, honor, soul's or body's lust — 

But he holds dreading when the fatal dart 
Of death shall strike it from his grasp to dust. 



And even though death, swift executioner, 

Were welcome in our Pleasures' loss and lack, 

The jailer Pain, deliberate minister 

Of justice, whips us to our dungeon back. 

3 



34 MISTS OF FIRE. 

As Faith dies, present losses, present gains, 

Make more and more the life ; and Science knows 

No higher function yet than out of Pain's 
Thickset of thorns to pluck us Pleasure's rose. 

O Science! yon expanse thou pushest out 
To where the cosmic suns are glimmers dim, 

And must thou blot man's inner heaven with doubt, 
And dwarf the soul to this mere self of him ? 



Such dwindled soul as, though all else were damned, 
Would save itself and seek its own reward 

Is what thou, Science, into brain hast crammed 
And left to end there by the doom abhorred. 

But does the Faith conceive a larger soul? 

Nay, larger in duration, not in aim : 
The bliss of self in Heaven she dreams as whole, 

With half mankind in everlasting flame. 



Self, self, self ever, self as hunger, thirst, 
As greed of ownership, as center, sum 

Of all desires, self seeking to be first 
Or best in this life or in life to come ! 



KAPNISMA. 35 

The Oriental fancy, in its dream 

Nirvana, whereinto the souls ascend, 

Lets Lethe through their selfhoods flow and stream 
To cleanse them of beginning as of end. 

That tenet of the Hindoo wisdom feels 
Toward the unutterable truth: the peace 

Of God, round which the Western reason reels, 
Is the All-Self, wherein all selves shall cease. 

All lines of selfishness converge to that, 
And all to one another draw more near 

As all approach what each is aiming at — 
The center of the universal sphere. 



Is this the doctrine of prosaic Pop< 

'Whatever is is right/ in rhythm and rhyme? 
Not so ; it is his logic lit with hope : 

There is no is from point to point of time. 



Right is a process ; what to one blind age 

Is wrong that makes the wild mobs rave may 
mark 

With a particular glory history's page 

And shine forth starlike from the general dark. 



36 MISTS OF FIRE. 

A straightening from errors and mishaps, 
Direction forward out of ignorance, 

Right is a process ; wrong a retrolapse — 
A gliding-back that measures right's advance. 

The world that was created in six days 
Is yet creating. Man is Adam still, 

And woman Eve, and still the serpent's ways 
Are poison, till mankind the doom fulfill 

Upon it — trample underfoot and crush 
The lower, so to rise and meet the call 

Of the Lord walking in the evening's hush 
And show no cringe of cowardice at all. 



The tempting spirit in disguise that creeps 
Upon its belly, and that weaves its charm 

Of dream's bewitchment and a lull like sleep's, 
Of wisdom known, shall lose its power to harm, 



It is my faith that man shall yet receive, 

Even through the pains of sin and pangs of birth 

And throes of death, the virtue to achieve 
The deed of immortality on earth. 



KAPNISMA. 37 

Though this poor body shall not witness it, 
The tree of life, which has eternal growth 

By evolution that is infinite, 

Must sometime come to amaranthine blowth. 



And this my soul, though held long in the gloom 
Of the slow growth's expansion, shall not sink, 

But, flushing upward, through that final bloom 
Shall taste the skies and wines of sunlight drink. 



But, ah, the gloom ! this darkness which shall yawn 
Between my day of life now soon to close 

And that unspeakably far future dawn 

Which I must wait for in the dread repose ! 

The horror of it who is there that scapes 
In age ? — sun setting, death's Pacific deep 

Stretching out skyward from the western capes, 
And on the beach his little boat of sleep ! 

O, it is well the faculties are dulled 

By Nature in the old years ! so the soul, 

Within the wasting body soothed and lulled, 
Revolts not at her motherly control. 



38 MISTS OF FIRE. 

She slows the functions of the sense and dims 
The consciousness ; with kisses calm, and mild 

Caresses, and sweet memory's evening hymns 
She charms to sleep the worn and weary child. 

But sad it is when still the spirit burns 

In old age clear and keen, and passions war 

In the weak frame, and strong ambition yearns 
For years, and dreams jump to the Terror; for 

In all life where is tragedy like that 
Which acts its darkness in an old man's brain 
When from the mystery sleep he wakes at night 
And ponders on the greater mystery, death ? 

The phantoms of his years throng round his bed 
(At first he knows them not from that night's 

dreams), 
And he remembers each one as himself — 
So many times himself a ghost in death. 

So much of him already lived away ! 
From boyhood's age of flame, youth's day of fire, 
Through manhood's hour of ardor, down to this — 
A moment's flash between a sleep and death ! 



KAPNISMA. 39 

Ah ! fair world rolling through the heaven of stars, 
Its lands and .seas, the thoughts and deeds of men, 
The stir of nations, all to drop at once 
Into the inane and dreamless night of death ! 

How shall these memories, these gains of man, 
These treasured sweets of life, the gatherings 
Of time so garnered in this flesh and blood, 
Be flung down to the sudden waste of death ? 

O Death ! thou art a far thought when the sun 
On high is shining and the blood is quick, 
While action roars around and busy days 
Forget — thou art a far thought then, O Death ! 

But in the darkness, when the years are dreams, 
When winds whine round the gables, wailing hope 
As a lost spirit, then as near as life, 
Nearer than madness, is the thought of death. 

For such a sick old age there is no cure ; 

Age needs the second childhood and the Mother's 
breast — 
To Mother Nature snuggling for her pure 

Soul-solace through the twilight into rest. 



40 MISTS OF FIRE. 

If she sustain us not then, if she brood 

Not over us with palms in blessing crossed, 

If she hush not our hunger-cries with food 
From her own fondling bosom, we are lost. 



If so she do not mother us to calm 
Of babyhood at bedtime, then the joys 

Of life in full play are the only balm 

For age's fever — give us back our toys ! 

Give to old Avarice his toy of pelf ; 

To old Ambition statecraft, battlefield ; 
Give old Romance the rainbow's end, himself, 

And to old Glory give his lance and shield. 



Old age that can not rest must neither rust ; 

Rust eats the soul. Leave longings and regrets ; 
Look not before or after ; what thou dost 

Do with the zeal which years and death forgets. 

Blest such an old age when it has its forte 
In art or science, or in aught that brings 

A use and need of studies that import 
Order and infinite imaginings. 



KAPNISMA. 41 

This makes glad labor that is never done ; 

This charms the sundown with a glory's glow ; 
'Follows the gleam' of heaven with Tennyson ; 

Flies with the strong old angel Angelo. 

Old ? Such rare spirits never age. We think 
Of their enlarged life but as youth increased : 

So circumpolar June sun does not sink, 

But makes of utmost north both west and east. 



And he is twice blest who in age pursues 

His art with young desire, but in the whiles 

Of rest sits down with Nature and renews 
Himself to childhood in her mother-smiles. 



This grim old appletree which many a May 

Has greened between my window and the morn 

Seems to me thinking now in every spray 
A thought that is to be a blossom born. 



Those maimed limbs plead thy story ; 

The wounds upon thy body speak for thee : 
Thou art a veteran soldier scarred with glory, 

My brave old Appletree ! 



42 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Oft hast thou borne up under 

Onset of storming wind and shot of hail ; 
And once a sword-lunge of assailant thunder . 

Slashed down thy barken mail. 

Old age, disease, and battle 

Have scathed and crooked and crippled all thy 
form, 
And thy Briarean bare arms clash and rattle 

Tossed in the wintry storm. 

I seem to feel thee shiver, 

As on thy nakedness hang rags of snow : 
May charitable Spring, the gracious giver, 

O'er thee her mantle throw. 

She will ; and sunshine spilling 

From blue skies thou again shalt drink as wine, 
To feel afresh the rush of young blood thrilling 

Through that old heart of thine. 

For in the season duly 

Each year there rises youth's perennial power 
Within thee, and thou then rejoicest newly 

In robes of leaf and flower. 



KAPNISMA. 43 

Ay, though thy years are many 

And sorrows heavy, yet from winter's gloom 
Thou issuest with the young trees, glad as any, 

As quick of green and bloom. 

The bluebird, warbling mellow 

Refrains, like memory comes and calls thy name ; 
And like first love, the oriole's pomp of yellow 

Flits through thy shade a flame. 

Thou quiverst in the sunny 

June mornings to the welcoming of song, 
And bees about their business of the honey 

Whisper thee all day long. 

Thus thou art blest and blessest — 

Thy grace of blossoms fruiting into gold ; 

And thus in touch with nature, thou possessest 
The art of growing old. 



III. 



As years increase, the wont of solitude 
Wins on the thinker — portals ear and eye 

Shutting against the world, to interclude 
The common show and noise we know it by. 



44 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Pity for age when it grows garrulous 

With memories of the dead, and in eclipse 

Of intellect gropes miserably thus 

To seek old friends in new companionships. 

Rather smoke so alone amid the leaves 

Here where the moonshine flickers on the grass, 

And feel the heavenly old remembered eves 
Like yonder westering star-streams overpass, 

Nay, now the heavens fall round me, and their stars, 
These myriad fireflies, grow alive and near — 

The far suns glimpsed in earthly avatars, 
Their years of motion flashed in instants here. 

Fireflies thrdugh the twilight glinting, 
How like memories they seem 

Of the light of days departed — 
Little flying flames of dream ! 

So return the days departed, 
As the fireflies flit and gleam. 

Fireflies, how like fleeting fancies — 
Come too thick for mind to mark, 

Gone too quick for words to capture 
And withhold them from the dark; 

Glimpses of that inner glory 
Never seen but spark by spark. 



KAPNISMA. 45 

Fireflies, they are thoughts that ravel 

Mysteries to strands of light ; 
But the strands re-twist and tangle 

And go breaking off in night, 
And the mysteries grow deeper 

As the ravelings grow bright. 



Fireflies in the darkness twinkling, 
How like hopes of earthly things ! 

Hopes defeated, hopes repeated, 
Apparitions, vanishings : 

dancings of the Light Eternal 
Through a shadowy sense of wings, 



Alone to heavens of memory — ay, and hells ! 

Remorse unlocks the graves ; deeds that have lain 
Entombed so long that conscience hardly spells 

Their epitaphs arise again and reign. 



But who or what shall help against the past ? 

With bitter in the sweet I mixed the cup — 
No chalice for communion ! I, at last, 

Who poured it, I alone must drink it up. 



46 MISTS OF FIRE. 

What ear with mine could make this night-breeze 
moan 
Through living kissed lips that have long been 
dust? 
Or in yon cricket's keen-cried monotone 

Hear that which fain my soul would not, but 
must ? 

Enough ! I as the white light of a star 
By distance dwindled from a flaming sun 

Would be beheld — flames, all that were and are, 
Into that gossamer of glitter spun. 

There is no sympathy that I could bear. 

Say I have dreamed ; but who shall enter sleep 
To dream my dreams and their remembrance share ? 

What a man sows, that let him also reap. 

Omnipotence itself could not expunge 
Man's memory and save alive his soul ; 

He is by what he was before the plunge 
Into oblivion. Centuries to roll 

Above his drowned consciousness would grow 

Into eternity, did he not dawn 
Like morning from the underworld, to glow 

In rays of self from rising memory drawn. 



RAPNISMA. Al 

His weaknesses and passions, pains and sins 
Are parts of him no prayer shall pray away ; 

He may not blot from mind its origins, 

Nor in death's night sleep off life's yesterday. 

The thoughts that are the Everlasting Fire, 
The thoughts that are the peace of Paradise, 

Are not the sentence of the Day of Ire, 
Are not the purchase of Atonement's price ; 



They are the records on the tablets etched 
Of one's own soul by his own good and ill : 

Out of our past the heaven and hell are fetched 
That shall together all our future fill. 



Nay, this day is the day of judgment ; this, 
This very eve of summer judges me — 

Confounding my horizon's round of bliss 
With wrathful tossings of the nether sea. 

Yet I am but a function of the cosmic life, 

A tool of nerves that nerveless Power employs 

To work in matter : what to It my strife 
Of being — my small sorrows and my joys ? 



48 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Name that Power God; is God, then, organism 

Of jierves, that pain and pleasure, life and death 
Should touch Him — His white light, which this our 
prism 

Of sense in passion's colors pictureth ? 

There is no pain save in some ganglion 
Of nerves ; to God, since he is absolute 

Of such, our pains and pleasures are all one ; 
For Him our suffering (this attribute 

Of flesh and blood, our test of right and wrong) 

Is no criterion of what to do 
In his wide cosmos ; nerve and brain belong 

To Him as means to do His purpose through. 

A thrill of least nerve-matter on a world 
(We call it pain or pleasure) is His touch 

Shaping all worlds — an atom's atom's twirled 
Adjustment to a myriad million such. 

Shall clay cry out against the potter's wheel 
That it is pain-pinched in the vessel's make ? 

Or to the potter that he does not feel 
The lump's endurance or the motion's ache ? 



KAPNISMA. 49 

Is God, so, concept of the fatalist — 
Intelligence, and Will, and Predesign, 

Creative Power no creature may resist, 
Love that is infinite, and Wrath divine? 



But why heap straw-pile logic Babel-wise, 
Fire it atop with dream, and by the flame 

Flashed into darkness hope to see the skies 
Written across with letters of His name ? 



For here all thought how baffled, words how vain ! 

On tired wing out through regions measureless 
Of suns and systems, suddenly the pain 

Of our own littleness (the soul's duress 

Of matter) strikes us like a rifle-shot, 
And we fall fluttering to our world to gasp 

The life out toward that Mystery we have not 
Faculty even to dream a hope to grasp. 

The Mystery of Godhood ! Infant men 

Have deemed it in their reach, as babes the moon : 

God was Creator, next Destroyer, then 
Redeemer, and to be Avenger soon. 



50 MISTS OF FIRE. 

But Pasht lies dead with Egypt's mummied cats, 
And Zeus is dumb in Hellas' marble art, 

And Rome's Jove nods no more the Fate's fiats: 
The Man Christ having come, the gods depart. 

"No eye hath seen the Father — who hath seen 
Me sees the Father" : Jesus' paradox 

To teach that form must ever intervene 
Between us and the Formless it inlocks. 

The gods were finite when the world was flat, 
With low-hung stars for lamps that lighted it ; 

But science that the old Faith shuddered at 

Hath stretched the heavens and made God in- 
finite. 

Whiteheat imagination into light 

And flash it straight a hundred million years, 
Where is the sky it reaches in its flight 

That blazes not still on with swarming spheres? 

Not strange that Rome should so have shrunk 
aghast 

From gazing through the Tuscan's telescope ; 
That startling revelation of the vast 

New awfulness of God blasphemed the pope. 



KAPNISMA. 51 

For, face to face with these infinities, 
How dare define, or dogmatize, or prate 

Familiarly of what God's person is, 

Measuring Him by human love and hate ? 

A gnat that lights upon my finger's tip 

As wisely might its thoughts of me rehearse 

As I my fancies of acquaintanceship 
With the Live Unit of the universe. 

Yet all the modes of reason men invent 

To solve the problem naught but growth shall 
solve 

Are nature's means for mind's development, 
Are ways whereby all souls to One evolve. 

We know God only as we grow to Him ; 

To feel the Power, ourselves must be the Power : 
The difference of men and seraphim 

Is growth from God in bud to God in flower. 

H(L $ Jfc 5JC 3fc 

Lo, I have smoked the moon down! she has 
dropped 

Out of the midnight ; and, as if all stir 
Of thought had with her fallen glory stopped, 

My spirit lapses to a dreamy blur. 



52 MISTS OF FIRE. 

The darkness pushes and the shadows ramp 
On me, and seem to leave my soul no room : 

I will within and by my study-lamp 
Labor for rest or think away my gloom. 

ONEIRODE. 

To think! to think and never rest from thinking! 

To feel this great globe flying through the sky 
And reckon by the rising and the sinking 

Of stars how long to live, how soon to die ! 

This, this is life. Is life, then, worth the living? 

This plotting for his freedom by the slave ! 
This agony of loving and forgiving! 

This effort of the coward to be brave ! 

Our freedom! We are sin-scourged into being, 
And ills of birth enslave us all our days ; 

No chance of flying and no way of fleeing, 
Until the last chance and the end of ways. 

We are walled in by darkness — wall behind us, 
From whose sprung dungeon-gates Fate dragged 
us in, 

And wall before us, where Fate waits to bind us 
And thrust us out through swinging gates of sin. 



KAPNISMA. 53 

But what is Fate? It is a mere breath spoken, 
To echo clamoring between the walls 

Of darkness — blind phrase uttered to betoken 
This blind Unreason which our life enthralls. 



Out through abysmal depths of heaven around us 
We think our way past orbs of day and night, 

Till skies of empty outer darkness bound us 

And place and time are fixed pin-points of light ; 



But nowhere from the silent planets wheeling, 
And nowhere from the thundering hells of suns, 

And nowhere from the darkness comes revealing 
Itself a Fate that through all being runs. 



No ghostly presence, no mysterious voices, 
The midnight of these infinite spaces thrill ; 

And even Chaos flies hence and rejoices 
To find and feel yon Universe's Will. 



Thought follows chaos — nay, without the places 
And times of matter globed and motion whirled, 

Thought chaos is, a spread dead wing in space is, 
Drifting for wafture somewhere toward a world. 



$4 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Where shall it reach and touch the Will Universal ? 

How with its confines bound the Infinite Mind? 
One atom of the Allsoul's whole dispersal 

Assuming how the whole shall be defined ! 

Such thinkings are not Thought; they are but 
dreamings 
Of what perchance may be itself but dream : 
Our truths are to the Truth as moonlight's gleam- 
ings 
In dungeon are to open noonday's beam. 

All worlds of matter, all the world of spirit, 
How these are one, eternal, increate — 

Soul can not clutch it, sense come never near it ; 
It is unthinkable, and it is Fate ! 

This awful riddle, wherewith we have struggled 
Since the dim dawn of human consciousness, 

With whatsoever dread words we have juggled — 
Ptah, Zeus, Jove, God — we fail, we fail to guess. 

Whether there be of all intelligences 
A total Sum, a comprehending Whole — 

Great sea, wherefrom rise all these mists, the senses, 
And back whereto flow all the streams of soul ? 



KAPNISMA. 55 

Whether this lives a selfexistent Essence, 
With its own passions, wills, imaginings, 

Or is but everlasting evanescence, 

But perfume of the bloom of living things ? 

How cosmic spirit can take hold of matter 
And give dead elements the living breath? 

How gather into selfhoods, and how scatter, 
To work the miracles of life and death? 



Poets in grand imagination's trances 

Conceive the gods and give them wondrous birth, 
And martyrs bleed for faith's divine romances, 

And priests go forth to proselyte the earth ; 



But what terrestrial religion reaches 

Out into heavenly majesty so far 
That it may guess what god strange nature teaches 

To the strange dwellers on the nearest star? 



Is Buddha known to denizens of Saturn? 

Is Jesus preached upon the Jovian moons ? 
And what are gods of any earthly pattern 

To far spheres drifting in the Force-monsoons ? 



56 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Yon sun's flame, in whose light our worlds go dark- 
ling 

To eyes that from another system gaze — 

Yon flaming sun is but a glimmer sparkling 

To like worlds blotted in the Dogstar's blaze. 

And, howsoever gravitation labors, 
It lets a million suns from vision slip ; 

While the ten million systems are not neighbors 
Even by light's fine far swift fellowship. 

How these immensities dwarf and obscure us ! 

What, what are we amid such scenes as these ? 
Our Earth unguessed in planets of Arcturus, 

Undreamed in orbs around the Pleiades ! 

By such infinitudes of distance bounded 

(These chasms of darkness that no light can 
leap !), 
We seem a dream with glooms of sleep surround- 
ed— 
Our life a dream surrounded with a sleep ! 

ANTONEIRODE. 

Ay, we are dreamed ; and if ever the Dreamer 
Wake from the sleep to remember the dream, 

We of His waking shall thrill in the tremor, 
Dawn with His memory, mingle and stream. 



KAPNISMA. 57 

What though He slumber through eon on eon ? 

When He has dreamed all the infinite full, 
Dreamed all the worlds and the lives there to be on, 

Out to dreamed gravity's uttermost pull ; 

Dreamed forth of matter and force interblended 
(Storm-drifts of matter and torrents of force) 

Cyclones of flame, globed, exploded, and rended — 
Wide wild beginnings of Time's endless course ; 

Dreamed out of chaos the suns in the spaces, 

Dreamed down the suns to their white molten 
cores, 

Dreamed off the worlds in their systemal places, 
Over them dreaming the continent-floors 

Out of their pulps of fire — dreaming the oceans 
Out of the rain from their heavens of steam, 

And of their mad elemental commotions 
Molding the motions of life in His dream ; 

Dreaming the marvelous atoms together 
Into the miracles feeling and thought, 

Hitching, with matter's mysterious tether, 
Selfhoods of sense to insensible naught ; 



58 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Dreaming the span of the measureless chasm 

Pawning between the alive and the dead — 
Wonder of dreams in the organless plasm 

Crawling to soul from the sea's oozy bed- 
Feeling to soul in the sea's vital foment, 

Feeling to form and to faculties dim, 
Till, at the touch of a consummate moment, 

Loosed into freedom to rise and to swim — 



Swimming of dreams in the nightmare of waters ! 

Hydras, chimeras, and gorgons of sleep, 
That by transitions of mutual slaughters 

Play the dream-tragedy Life in the deep ; 

When His long dream through the spawning and 
swarming 

Sea-generations has passed into things 
Creeping aland, and has risen transforming 

Into the slow apparition of wings ; 

When from the budding of nerves in the banded 
Spirals of earth-crawling pleasure and pain 

Upward has issued His dream and expanded 
Into the glorified blooming of brain — 



KAPNISMA. 59 

Flower of all the world's forces and ages, 
Top-bloom of matter exhaling the soul, 

Opening volume whose unopened pages 
Yet of God's being shall utter the whole, — 

Here from His dream shall He start into waking — 
Dream of the universe waking in Me — 

Me as a shore where the great billows breaking 
Leap out of silence in sounds of the sea ! 

Here, in the self of Me, here wakes the Dreamer, 
Wakes and shall wake as the brain shall unfold ; 

Here is the Christ of God, here the Redeemer, 
Spirit incarnate that Faith has foretold. 



Growth of the brain shall be God manifested 
Here in the flesh, when the dead shall arise, 

By an inherited memory vested 
With the immortal life dreamed of the skies. 



Whatso has ever with being been gifted, 
Since the first givings of being began, 

Living again shall be gathered and lifted 
In the Sovereign Consciousness, Man. 



60 MISTS OF FIRE. 

He shall remember all living and dying, 
He shall think back to life's origin here — 

Nay, shall recall when he hither came flying, 
Seed of life ripened in some other sphere — 



Brought by some inter-world wind accidental, 
Or by some gravity's fated monsoon, 

Hence to be traced by that form rudimental 
Haply through all forms of life on the moon. 



So shall he read the soul's mystery-story, 
Turning the pages from star back to star, 

Now in the gloom and again in the glory, 
Till he shall come where the last secrets are. 



Then, so with insight illumined to seeing 
All that has been, he shall see all that is — 

Thrill with the pulses of all the world's being, 
Make all the God of the universe his. 



Yet shall he, ere that divine consummation, 
All the career of existence have run, 

World after world, to his last habitation — 
Seraph of light on the Ultimate Sun ; • 



KAPNISMA. 61 

Sun, of the globes of all systems compacted, 
Orb, of all motion the center and rest 

(Time to a moment eternal contracted), 
Goal of all spirits immortal and blest ! 



They shall be one, though their number be legion, 
And with One Consciousness they shall revive 

Into the bliss of that radiant region 
All of the past that was ever alive. 



MISTS OF FIRE 63 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 



PESSIM. 

O this longing to live ! 

This tragical strife 
Of us mortals to give 

Our lives more of life ! 

Give us new ! give us more ! 

We hunger, we thirst, 
We aspire, we implore — 

Give most, best or worst! 



We inherit the ages 
Of human desire; 

Ay, within us yet rages 
The older brute-fire. 



All that is we have been, 
Of air, earth, or sea; 

Whether wing, foot, or fin, 
One kindred are we. 



64 MISTS OF FIRE. 

In our blood flowing down 
From primitive man, 

Savage, saint, sage, and clown 
Have blent as it ran. 



All their lives are our life, 
Their lusts are our lust; 

And we strive with their strife, 
Then — dust to their dust! 



OPTIM. 

Dust to dust? No, that doom 

We will not endure! 
Us the prisoning tomb 

Shall never immure! 

When the star-stuff of heaven 
From God was outwhirled 

It was stirred with the leaven 
Of life of the world. 



PESSIM. 

God? And where then was man? 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 65 

OPTIM. 

Lo, God and man one 
Ere the fire-mist began 
To swirl-in to sun ! 



For man's wills and desires 

Repeat and rehearse 
Those which motived the gyres 

Of this universe. 



Ay, and not only his, 
But those of the whole 

Life that was and that is 
Of God, the One Soul. 

Life eternally must 
Be motion of Him — 

From dull worms in the dust 
To keen seraphim. 

Every pleasure and pain, 

Of stir in the clod 
Or of thrill in the brain, 

Is living of God. 



66 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Life shall vanish away 
And finish its course 

When He ceases to play 
With matter and force. 

PESSIM. 

Will He cease? 

OPTIM. 

No, He never, 
Till matter is hurled 
Into naught, can dissever 
Himself from the world. 



All delights and all doles — 
Thought, passion, and strife — 

Are the Infinite Soul's 
Large living of life. 

PESSIM. 

Then, on whom Faith has leaned 
Lives not ; for it seems 

We are whims of some Fiend 
That slumbers and dreams ' 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 67 

Unimaginable Demon! 

With cosmic fire-storms 
In His crazed sleep to dream on 

And dream into forms! 



Lo, a huge fancy runs 
Athwart His vast sleep, 

And ten millions of suns 
Blaze out in the deep. 



His deliriums dim 

In meteors flock, 
And with whimseys of Him 

Wild stars intershock. 



All the rocks are one tomb 
Of moods of His mind, 

Cast away to make room 
For us living kind; 



Phantoms ! dancing and hymning, 
While here where we dwell 

Is but film overswimming 
An ocean of hell! 



68 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Smoking peaks burst in thunder 
And shower down death, 

And the plains gape asunder 
With doom in a breath. 



Commerce rises and dips 
With east and west sun, 

As her shuttles, the ships, 
Weave states into one; 



But the sea, the brute sea, 
That swings round the sphere, 

Never heeds the wild plea 
Of man in his fear: 



Him and his its rude surges 
Toss, buffet, and drown, 

As it yawns in its gurges 
And ravins them down. 



And the beasts of the deep, 
Like phantoms that form 

In the nightmares of sleep — 
Grim monsters that swarm 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 69 

In the darkness of waters, 

And gorge mouth and maw 
With their mutual slaughters 

By snout, tooth, and jaw — 

How the swift silent beasts 

In combat partake 
Of the fattening feasts 

The mad billows make! 



'Lord of life and of death, 
Have mercy on me!' 

Cry that squanders the breath 
On storm, night, and sea. 

Cry for God's mercy where, 

In maniac bout 
With the powers of the air, 

The great waters shout? 



Where from mountains' pent hollows 

Hell bursts out on men? 
Where earth opens and swallows 

And closes again? 



70 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Cry for mercy where thunder 
Drops death from the clouds? 

Where the ghosts rise from under 
And mix with the crowds 



Of the living, unheard, 
Unseen, and unknown, 

Till with mortal plague stirred 
The scared cities groan? 

Mercy! No, there is none 

In whatever force 
Wherewithal the Lord Sun 

Gives life and death source. 



'Fire V A cry in the night — 
One cry, and no more 

Ere the streets fill with fright 
And clamor and roar. 



To the flames all the city ! 

Stop not now to call 
That Almighty have pity — 

The water has all. 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 71 

'O my husband ! — my child !' 

A mother and wife 
In the first terror wild 

Has fled for her life 



From the room where she kept 
Love's wake by dead love, 

And her innocent slept 
Unfathered above. 



'Dead ! — dear love !' Off she flings 

Whoever delays 
Her mad purpose, and springs 

Back into the blaze. 



Through the flame and the smoke, 

Past him lying dead, 
Up the stair, scorch and choke, 

To find the babe's bed! 



Scarce a moment to speak 
One vain phrase of prayer 

Ere the woman's death-shriek, 
And, framed in the glare 



72 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Through the window revealed, 
A picture that robbed 

Men of breath, and down kneeled 
The women and sobbed; 



Picture, flashed upon flame, 
Of two forms in white ! 

Then picture and frame 
One red blur of night! 

Was it rage, was it ire 
Of some god above? 

Or, mad hunger of fire 
For woman's mad love? 



Woman's love! Love belongs 
To Force, and is part 

Of the rights and the wrongs 
Of dull Nature's heart. 



How is Force when it burns 
And flares out its breath 

Worse than Force when it yearns 
And dares unto death? 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 73 

What is better or worse, 

Where all only seems? 
What is blessing or curse, 

In drama of dreams? 



What is saintship or sin? 

To climb or to fall, 
Or to lose or to win ? 

The One lives it all. 



'All delights and all doles — 

Thought, passion, and strife- 
Are the Infinite Soul's 
Large living of life V 

Is it living of thought 
Or living of trance? 

And is purpose outwrought 
From chance upon chance? 

What purpose in killing 

My darling, my boy ? 
What demoniac thrilling 

Of infinite joy 



74 MISTS OF FIRE. 

From the little life lying 
In fever's hot flame 

And in last anguish crying 
The mother's fond name? 



Stricken wife of my youth! 

O, how from that day 
Didst thou pine for what truth 

Death's morrow might say ! 



In the hope of that morrow, 
Thou, patient and brave 

With thy burden of sorrow, 
Soon went to the grave 



In the travail of mother 

Of that little-one 
Who should follow the brother 

Ere one year were done. 

O, the faint pulses' warning! 

O, loving last words! 
In the spring, in the morning, 

With songs of the birds ! 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 75 

I explore all the dark, 

I search sleep for her; 
But there comes not a spark, 

Or whisper, or stir 

From all hearing, all seeing, 

All feeling of Force, 
Hinting whether her being 

Hold conscious its course, 

So that still might be shown 

Her dear form and face 
And herself still be known 

In time and in space. 

As the rose, as the lily, 
Yield up scent and hue, 

Yield their ghosts to the chilly- 
White death of the dew, 



Did my home's living flowers 

So fade and exhale? 
And have these lives of ours 

No other avail 



MISTS OF FIRE. 

Than to feel. love, and think 

One moment of ligh:. 
And then suddenly sink 

In morningless night? 

Is existence too rife 

In earth's human hives. 

That the Life of all life 
Should so lavish lives? 

Lives of men. lives of brutes. 
They crowd to their tombs. 
Like the .eaves, like the fruits. 

Which fall for new blooms. 

OPTIM. 

Famine, pestilence, flood. 
Fire, thunder, and quakes 

Of the earth, and the blood 
Volcanic that breaks 

From the hot veins of mountains, 
And tempests that plow 

The great deep to its fountains — 
Does God, thinkest thou. 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 77 

Heed of thee in thy plaint 

That these never choose 
Between sinner and saint 

Where life is to lose? 



Holy Jews, ye that priced 
God's life, and decried 

The immaculate Christ, 
And him crucified; 



Ye, with credos for charters 
To hunt and to slay, 

That re-sainted with martyrs 
Bartholomew's day; 



Ye that bloodied the ages 
With myriad lives' loss 

In religion's blind rages 
Of Crescent and Cross; 



Ye that fire martial leaders 

With adulant breath, 
Making mothers proud breeders 

Of doers of death — 



78 MISTS OF FIRE. 

All the civilizations 

Of man standing armed, 

Nation fronting each nation's 
Blood-hunger, alarmed, — 

How would dare ye appeal 
To God that He make 

The brute elements feel 
For your human sake? 

God is you and in you, 
As they and in them ; 

And shall one of His two 
The other condemn? 

PESSIM. 

Where is fault, then, or sin 
In them or in us — 

We and all we are in 
Unpurposed as thus? 

For be all forms and motions 
Divine, and they seem 

But the miscreate notions 
Of God in a dream. 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 79 

OPTIM. 

No! the seeming is thine; 

For, could all the mass 
Of the universe shine 

Through thy little glass; 

Could the Allbeing flow 

Entire into thee, 
So that Substance might show 

And Essence might see; 

Couldst thou know what beginning 

To what end belongs ; 
Couldst thou witness Fate spinning 

The Right out of wrongs, — 

Thou wouldst rise from the dark 

Wherein flesh is born, 
And with song like the lark 

Soar into the morn. 

No! the dreaming is ours; 

God's life is not trance, 
But the sum of the powers 

Of all lives' advance. 



80 MISTS OF FIRE. 

How we struggle to live ! 

God urges the strife 
Of all beings to give 

Their lives more of life. 



From the instinct that lurked 
In plasm of old seas 

He and we have upworked 
Through myriad degrees, 



Climbing higher and higher, 
With gain upon gain, 

Till at last the soul's fire 
Is lit in the brain. 



In this upward progression 

Humanity's birth 
Is the highest expression 

Of God on the earth. 



Yet the heavens are swarmed 
With worlds older far; 

And what lives, angel-formed, 
May people a star, 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 81 

Neither spectroscope's feel 

Nor telescope's ken 
Shall avail to reveal 

To senses of men. 



But these five senses grew, 
As others may grow — 

Senses so searching-through, 
Brain facultied so, 

Seized of force by such arts, 
That mind may embrace 

Other mind in far parts 
Of infinite space. 

Other mind may be there 
With powers so strange 

That our own would not dare 
Imagine their range. 



Can these pinholes of sight 
Of ours comprehend 

With what uses of light 
High beings may send 



6 



S2 MISTS OF FIRE. 

The quick soul through the dense 
Vast darkness of naught, 

And by some inner sense 
See us and our thought ? 

And to what fuller blowth 
This flesh shall unfold, 

What the grandeur of growth 
Its energies hold, 



Man can now no more dream 
Than through his life dim 

In the worm there could stream 
A prescience of him. 

But we know that we climb ; 

We see that we rise — 
See how time unto time 

We widen the skies. 



From the ten fingers' count 
Of numbers, begun 

In the savage, we mount 
And measure the sun. 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 83 

Fabled Jupiter's nods, 

That Nature obeyed, 
And those gorgonish gods, 

Her forces, which played 



Chiefest part in mankind's 
Last dream before day — 

All the myths from all minds 
Have faded away, 



Where the Self-Revelator 

Immanuel stands 
As the human creator 

By human love's hands. 



God is with us and in us 

(Within is above), 
And our lives work to win us 

His life by our love. 



Whether I will or whether 
Will not as He would, 

All with all things together 
Work only for good. 



84 MISTS OF FIRE. 

All the wrong I commit, 

Mankind so unite 
To exterminate it 

They strengthen all right. 

So, we grow by our sins ; 

Iscariot betrays, 
And the Nazarene wins 

Through all after days. 

Lo, the Wrong that hath died 
To Hades is hurled, 

While the Right, crucified, 
Redeemeth the world. 

PESSIM. 

But redemption to cornel 
What boots that to thee, 

Thou for eons then dumb, 
Deaf, dead soul of me? 

What is this we have dreamed ? 

Whereto have we raved? 
When the world is redeemed 

Shall my soul be saved? 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 85 

OPTIM 

Timid soul! thou art fleeing 

False danger: fear not; 
For thy sweet self of being 

Shall ne'er be forgot. 



Man inherits the ages, 
And shall, with the whole 

Of his grand heritages, 
Inherit the soul. 



There are times when far places, 
Where strangers we roam, 

Flash familiar with traces 
Of some former home. 



There are hours when such trances 

Efface all that is 
That we dream circumstances 

Of past centuries. 



There are moments we hear 
A dead father's tone 

In our voices, so clear 
It startles our own. 



86 MISTS OF FIRE. 

We are writ in as books 
By hands from the sides, 

And ghost-ancestry looks 
Oft out of our eyes. 

These are half-resurrections 
Of souls that are gone — 

Dim and fitful projections 
Of that coming dawn 

Of All-Consciousness, when 
In Man there shall stand 

The whole lives of past men, 
So livingly scanned, 



So remembered, so real, 
So self-substantive, 

That, no longer ideal, 
They truly shall live. 



Why is this a hard saying? 

Heredity grows, 
And the part it is playing 

Shall never have close. 



PESSIM AND OPTIM. 87 

As the form and the feature, 

The tone and the trait, 
The whole self of each creature, 

Are so destinate 



From the procreant mold, 
Shall mind not progress 

Till by heirship it hold 
All past consciousness? 

And, if far-future Man 

Remember so me, 
From the hour I began 

Till ceasing to be — 



So revive me, so live me, 
So breathe my soul's breath- 

What is that but to give me 
Sure triumph o'er death? 



O immortal my soul! 

To live and to know 
And flow on with the whole 

Divine Being's flow! 



88 MISTS OF FIRE. 

O my soul! from the dark 
Wherein flesh is born 

Soar and sing like the lark! 
For here is the morn ! 



MISTS OF FIRE. 89 



A KEEN SWIFT SPIRIT. 



Beyond these worlds of living and of dying, 
Beyond the sun, beyond the Pleiads seven, 

A keen swift spirit of the Earth went flying 
Along outside the crystal walls of Heaven. 

Never a soul had come to those walls younger 
Not bidden thither by the angel Death; 

Never a mortal with diviner hunger 

For life above the life of blood and breath. 

He was a youth grown old with love and sorrow, 
With wrongs of circumstance and faults of birth — 

The grub Today with butterfly Tomorrow 
Aching within it as it crawls the earth. 

His hopes were fire, and his imagination 

Flew forth as flame, to burn the world with them 

And re-create the old stuff of creation 
For the Divine John's New Jerusalem. 



90 MISTS OF FIRE. 

But the dull world had deemed him scarce worth 
scorning ; 

His thought just bubbled on thought's ocean- 
stream ; 

And so his life had mooned away its morning, 

A blind sleep-walking in a fevered dream. 

Now he had left himself here standing under 
The stars — so do the stars rare souls entice — 

While he had flown out on the wings of wonder 
And stopped against the walls of Paradise. 

He sought along and up and down for casement, 
Or gate, or loophole in those walls, but found 

No entrance, and he drooped in such abasement 
That he fell back to flesh and clutched the ground. 

And whether in the body then or whether 
Without the body, such a voice he caught 

As of two flutes that sing at night together 
Into a dreamer's ear unearthly thought: 

The gates into peace are withholden 

To seeking of mortal sense, 
And never the Kingdom of Heaven 

Is taken by violence. 



A KEEN SWIFT SPIRIT. 91 

Man finds but the one gate of entrance — 

It yields to the passer's breath 
On hinges that give only inward — 

The gate of the way of death. 

But outward the secret gates many 

Let open from bliss within, 
Swing open for issuing angels 

To pass to the worlds of sin. 

As I with associable seraphs 

That chorally sing and fly 
Came out to the straight gate of Lyra, 

Thy ardor I felt go by. 

The virtue I felt of thy ardor 

Go by like a whirl of fire, 
And burned to upbear thee and steady 

The flight of thy fierce desire. 



I rushed to the gate and outpushing 
I followed and fell with thee ; — 

But thou shalt arise again thither, 
If thou wilt but follow me. 



92 MISTS OF FIRE. 

He started — lo, the stars above him gleaming! 

Upon his lifted forehead damps of dew ; 
And he grew ware that he had stood there dreaming 

While past him notelessly the winged hours flew. 

But had he dreamed? Xo, no, that voice was real ! 

He looked round for the angel's fleshly guise, 
And met a maid's face that was love's ideal. 

Unutterable passion in her eyes. 

She rose there in the moonrise like a lily — 
As if a lily that had sprung and grown 

From the sown moonlight suddenly and stilly 
And into bloom miraculously blown. 

"Sweet ! O my darling!" cried he, arms outstretch- 
ing, 

"Hast thou come back to me here out of death? 
And no reproaches in those fond eyes fetching ! 

Xothing but love in them, Elizabeth !" 

So cried he. running forward to infold her, 
Once more to fold the dear form in his clasp, 

But when he reached his hand to grasp and hold her, 
A moonbeam through the pine-leaves mocked his 
grasp. 



A KEEN SWIFT SPIRIT. 93 

"I heard a spirit speak, as I am living! 

If I stand here, I saw that form and face !" 
And at his own shocked voice a shudder giving, 

He turned and fled as from a haunted place. 

A sudden gust of childhood's superstitions 
Blew though his memory, and, as he sped, 

A darkling company of apparitions 

Chased him with ghostly whispers of the dead. 

He passed the old church with the graves around it ; 
It seemed that all the white stones were astir ! 

And hers — how oft by day his flowers had crowned 
it- 
Why should he flee in horror now from her? 

But he paused not to chide his soul affrighted 
(Death's world was back of him and life's before) 

Until he stood within his chamber lighted 

And had against the night locked fast the door. 

"O Jesus! dear Redeemer!" sinking, kneeling, 
He prayed, "if I had stayed myself on thee, 

I might have felt the other world with feeling 
Such as bestead thee in Gethsemane. 



94 MISTS OF FIRE. 

"Yet, my Lord Christ ! remember, O ! recall thee 
That thou wast master over death and hell, 

And nothing, as thou knewest, could befall thee, 
Even though Roman scourge and cross befell. 

"But I am young and weak, and grope in error; 

Forgive me that thy courage could not save 
My spirit from the lifelong world-old terror 

Of musing in the darkness on the grave! 

"Sweet Savior ! life is dear and light is glorious 
To the young man — O, give me life and light ! 

Life that is light and light that is victorious 
Over the awful powers of the night!" 



II. 



Years came to him, though never had come answer 
To that night's cry to Christ to make him whole ; 

But doubt had grown upon him like a cancer, 
Still eating toward the vitals of his soul. 

He stumbled through the years, and as he stumbled, 
Men said he sinned against the Holy Ghost's 

Longsuffrance, for that he had never humbled 
Himself to magnify the Lord of Hosts. 



A KEM SWIFT SPIRIT. tt 

Life had he asked, not hope of life in Glory ; 

Light had he prayed for, not for faith to stand 
On Dogma's little island-promontory 

And feel across the blinding seas to land. 

And, what though sky-roofed science all achieving, 
He longed beyond the far horizon's rim ; 

He raged to know ; he could not rest believing ; 
The mysteries of God were pangs in him. 



For, what saith science of the great Beginning? 

A Force, however named (how empty names !), 
Set infinite chaos thrilling, stirring, spinning, 

Till Darkness bloomed to countless million 
flames. 

What was that Force — ay, what still is it? 

Those flames are suns, to globes is chaos whirled, 
And life upon them comes a sudden visit 

From some unthinkable rare inner world. 

O Life ! Life first, life last, and life amiddle 

Of the eternity beyond the years 
Of stars in motion ! Whoso reads this riddle 

Shall hear the soundless music of the spheres. 



96 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Of this what teaches Darwin more than Moses ? 

Nor growth nor quick creation from the clod 
Explains for us the blooming of the roses — 

One least sweet secret of the life of God. 



There is no God' — the flippant fool's old saying, 
The blinkard's logic, or the coward's curse ! 

What, then, this procreant Life-Force intraplaying 
Throughout the matter of the universe? 



I Am ! The Hebrew seer's clairvoyant seeing 
Flashed to the depths in that one fulgent phrase : 

I Am — the Consciousness! I Am — the Being! 
Whatever comes or goes, I Am — that stays ! 

I Am — in all things ! and whenever, thinking, 
Mind so forth-stars its being as to find 

Its own form I-am, then begins it drinking 
The influx of the Omnisplendent Mind. 

Life's organ is a vase that death shall shatter, 
And so, saith science, death shall Me undo. 

What, then, is that which organizes matter 
To form the vase and pours me thereinto ? 



A KEEN SWIFT SPIRIT. 97 

Ay, what is that ? The One Life Everlasting ! 

And that small part of it to me which runs, 
Needing to fear no loss, and no outcasting, 

And no undoing, shall outlive the suns. 

But what becomes, thus, of the narrow teaching 
That man alone to life immortal springs? 

This thought of immortality is reaching 
Enough to gather all organic things. 



Organic, ay, as also inorganic, 

In some mode must eternally survive; 
But life is not life's energy mechanic — 

Life's consciousness is all that is alive. 



And though we needs must fail in our endeavor 
To trace this in the dumb life downward, yet 

Wherever life is / it lives forever; 
I am I-Am, that never can forget. 



Selfhood is first the little airy trouble 

In depths of water — to expand and rise 

Through clear and clearer, and at last to bubble 

Out into God and with Him fill the skies. 
7 



98 MISTS OF FIRE. 

God's play in matter is to man existence, 
Ay, and to all lower and all higher forms — 

As low as in the sea-ooze find subsistence, 
As high as wherewithal the ether swarms. 

For higher there are — man may not bear to hear it, 
As boasting God's own image — higher there are ; 

God's image is not frame of flesh, but spirit: 
I Am I-atn in strange forms on a star. 

This flesh-and-blood is so below our wishes — 
Our dreams as man, our childhood's reach of 
words — 

We grudge their grace of swimming to the fishes, 
Envy the joy of flying in the birds. 

And our desires are prophecies ; as surely 

As sometime somewhere we shall live again, 

So shall our lives be not our memories purely, 
But all our prayers shall live their full amen. 

Religion notes this in transcendent features 

Of angels, and Apocalyptic John 
Dreams truth in strange-formed, strange-eyed won- 
drous creatures 

With God's high glory clothed upon. 



A KEEN SWIFT SPIRIT. 99 

Who knows the outcome of life's evolution 
Even on planets that our sun reflect? 

Mayhap rare winged shapes, with no diminution, 
But increase rather, of man's intellect. 

Why may there not be souls of such high pattern 
In bodies of such superhuman mold 

On moons of Jupiter or rings of Saturn 
That man in them would seeming gods behold ? 

And if, light's miracle of motion working, 

Natives of higher spheres could visit man, 

What strangers might we greet from great worlds 
lurking 

Within the sun-blaze of Aldebaran! 

If they could visit man ! O, to unravel 
These mysteries of force which interlock 

Planets and suns ! — perceive how light can travel 
A million miles in six beats of the clock ! — 

How gravitation holds the worlds together, 

By atoms hitched, with air-threads dreamed of 
steel, 

And reels the comets in with spun-out tether 
From distances the mind is dumb to feel ! — 



100 MISTS OF FIRE. 

How panting pulse of heat through ether oozes 
Velocities that mock the lightning's flash, 

And how the spirit of the lightning loses 
Its mighty silence in the thunder's crash! 

To penetrate such secrets to their sources 
And essences would help us comprehend 

How instant-constant Everlasting Force is 
To thrill the universe from end to end. 



And through that Force, by impress hypnotismal 
Controlling sense and reason under sleep, 

High souls may yet the intervoids abysmal 
Between the worlds with converse overleap. 



Nay now, to such souls, may not worlds be blended 
And held in thought too fine for words to frame, 

Even as some sun-system vast and splendid 
Is blent to vision in a drop of flame ? 



Doubtless; and these unspeakable thought-trances 
Of genius and rapt faith's foretastes of bliss 

May be but glimpses of mind's high advances 
In ampler being, flashed back into this. 



A KEEN SWIFT SPIRIT. 101 

What though, then, dies this organ of the senses, 
The contents are not spilled when breaks the cup ; 

The other world's divine intelligences 

Shall drink this consciousness and memory up. 



III. 



So he the ancient powers of darkness routed ; 

So he with death's keen terrors ended strife ; 
No more now he believed, no more he doubted ; 

He knew that we have everlasting life. 

Not such life, truly, as the resurrection 
Of this gross body promises to creed ; 

Not life that is of flesh a mere affection, 

But life that makes flesh live, the life indeed. 

"To know myself as Me and not another, 

In whatsoever form I may reside — 
Whatever strange new nature Me may mother — 

This is the life indeed, this shall abide. 

"O life! — but I would jump the inter-world abysses 
Now, in the flesh ! would slip the earthly bond 

Now, ere my death, to find what this life misses 
In beatific spheres of life beyond. 



102 MISTS OF FIRE. 

"O life ! O love ! since death disbloomed my pleasure 

Of living, never has it ceased tc seem 

That love the space between the worlds must meas- 
ure 

And lead life over on a bridge of dream. 

"Nay, she has measured it, and she has thrilled it 
With her sweet presence ofttimes ; and I pine 

To cross that bridge with her, if love can build it — 
Love, architect and pontifex divine ! 

"Since that night when the angel, from those bliss- 
ful 

Abodes I then believed in, sang her song 

Between worlds, that world has been filling this full 

Of her felt constancy and yearning strong. 

"She was that angel ; and if I distorted 

Or heard not rightly what she sought to say, 

It was that faith's traditions in me thwarted 
Her thought and warped her utterance aw r ay. 

"But now I dawn to truth : she hath inspired me 
To seek her love in passion other far ; 

I am to find her soul ; she hath desired me 
To meet her passion in a higher star. 



A KEEN SWIFT SPIRIT. 103 

"For still she loves ; her fond eyes burn within me, 
And in my sleep she hugs me in her arms ; 

Her kisses in the night from sorrow win me 
And from the sinful day's delusive charms. 

"Glad sleep ! — I go to it as I went try sting 
In our first love ; I lapse from life forlorn 

And meet a dream from over-shadows misting 
Into her form, to mate with me till morn. 

"We walk the world and live the old love over ; 

We list love's whispers in the leafy darks; 

Through meads we hunt love's luck in four-leaved 
clover, 

And taste the love-screams of the meadowlarks. 

"What never in the mornlight or the noonlight 
Her tongue-tied bashfulness would dare let slip 

She smiles to hear the brook tell in the moonlight 
And ripples babble it from lip to lip. 

"And when at such times oft I make her sing me 
In right words what the ripples say in runes 

She croons me sweets that hit my soul and sting me, 
Her rapt face glowing like the harvest-moon's : 



104 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Love's feet ! we feel them on the brink 
Along where we run crinkling. 

Love's eyes ! all four of them ! we wink 
The stars to watch them twinkling. 

Love's thought! Love must be daft to think 
We would not tell it tinkling. 

Love's hair! but which head should possess 

The short or longer tresses 
Of heads together, who may guess? 

Love's kiss — hah, love's caresses! 
Not quite so cold as when we press 

The chilly watercresses. 

Ah Love! delicious little imp! 

Almost enough to wimple 
Us back up stream and into gimp 

Of ice our wavelets crimple! 
So might we teach thee to be primp, 

Demure in every dimple. 

But, Love, we may not stop: we sing 

Ourselves on down the dingle ; 
And as we go our lives we fling 

Together more and mingle ; 
But, ah warm hearts that closer cling! 

Ah pulses warm that tingle ! # 



A KEEN SWIFT SPIRIT. 105 

"So she interprets me the ripples' voices ; 

She witches me, she kisses me, she brings 
All moods of love to me, and she rejoices 

My heart with passion's heavenward-flaming 
wings. 



"But sometimes, with sobbed stammerings, fierce 
flushes 

Of jealousy, and blinding tears, she lets 
The dream ebb out, and sudden darkness rushes 

Back on my soul, a surge of wild regrets." 



IV. 



The constant angel of his dreams in vision 
Of soul's reality he hoped to meet, 

Either in this or in some world elysian, 

Ere yet his years of mortal were complete. 



He sought some clew in ologies and isms ; 

Psychology, and hypnotism, and those — 
How name them? — those material cataclysms 

Of spirit which arrive in shocks and blows. 



106 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Once, in a circle that for spirits waited, 

A Lady took him with her wondrous eyes — 

Weird eyes, that marvelously fascinated 
His thoughts, and seemed their secrets to surprise. 

Those magic eyes went through and through him 
blazing, 

And then withdrew and inward seemed to look, 

While words she murmured, all his reason dazing, 

Came quoted from his heart as from a book : 

"As I with associable angels 

That chorally sing and fly 
Came out to the strait gate of Lyra, 

Thy ardor I felt go by. 

'The virtue I felt of thy ardor 

Go by like a whirl of fire, 
And burned to upbear thee and steady ♦ 

The flight of thy fierce desire." 

The circle their congratulations clamored, 
And pressed him to identify and name 

The dead. With horror he denying stammered, 
And lied the truth with love's courageous shame. 



A KEEN SWIFT SPIRIT. 107 

If ever falsehood needed no forgiving, 
Having no sin, it was that truth in mask ; 

For surely she was not dead, but most living— 
What life, they would not know how even to ask. 



The dead live not as old forms resurrected 
In like new forms of unsubstantial air; 

They live as facts of consciousness collected 
Into brain's living here or otherwhere. 

And if an earthly life is not worth keeping 
Here in remembrance, elsewhere it is not ; 

Such life shall sleep, shall long continue sleeping- 
Though at the last it shall not be forgot. 

It dies not, but shall sleep, and, when the waking 
Of Mind's all-consciousness has memorized 

The universe, shall then come forth retaking 
The selfhood which had seemed so sacrificed. 



What though oblivion drown it in an ocean 
Of weltering eons, when it shall emerge, 

Without a memory of a dream of motion, 
The time will seem a second's oversurge. 



fcW STS OF FIRE. 

But souls that soar, fine spirits that refresh as, 
And that renew the life their living graced- 

These do not die ; their being is too precious 
To lie an instant fan suspension's waste. 



These are caught up : by process of inclusion 
The larger mind of high worlds takes the less; 
uch has not died — it is not death, but fusion 
Of less with larger, eager to possess. 



And naught of consciousness — life's very essence 
In that containing mind shall this mind miss 

For, by the two selves' inmost coalescen: 
That shall remember when it lived as this 



A noble poet of our time, in query 

On this rare theme of life in Life absorbed, 
Has dreamed it as a state of blankness dreary. 

The memory blotted and the seH unorbed. 



What, then, is memory?' Is it brain's possession 
Alone, to lapse with dying brain's rekas 

Or is it Life lived here in brain's impression, 
To hold in higher life when this shall cease ? 



A KEEN SWIFT SPIRIT. 109 

And what is selfhood but in memory's mirror 
The living image of the life's own past? 

That image, surely, shall be fuller, clearer, 
When in a larger, truer memory glassed. 

But can there be brain capable of holding 
More than one memory — one life, that is? 

Nay, why not brain a million lives infolding, 
Living them all through all their memories ? 

There may be brains in yonder worlds of splendor 

Whose plentitude we might but so conceive 
As we conceive those worlds themselves from slen- 
der 

Threads of the starlight they through darkness 
weave. 

And, as they take our memories, they give us 
Thereby the resurrection; for, as heirs 

Of all we were, they represent and live us, 
And are our very selves, as we are theirs. 



V. 



Thought so beyond that circle and the Medium, 
So outside all their doctrine's range and scope, 

To them but jargon would have been and tedium, 
If he had spoken thus his faith and hope. 



110 3/7575 OF FIRE. 

But he spoke not, save as he made denial 
Touching the dead ; still pondering if part 

The dead had had in that tranced woman's trial 
At reading secrets written in his heart. 

Then was proposed to be experimented 

(The Lady's eyes grew smothered flame in smoke) 

Whether, that night, conditions so consented 
That she might spirits into form invoke. 

A side-room veiled off with a doorway's curtain,. 

The spirit-rapturist there closeted. 
The lights dimmed down to glimmering uncertain. 

And that hushed circle waiting for the dead ! 



Poor soul-sick longers for a fleshly witness 

Of immortality! O. dolorous! 
With thirst, with hunger, yet with no more fitness 

To taste the everlasting life than thus! 

But hist! The curtain rustled, and forth glided 
A woman, white-gowned, willowy of form. 

With shower of hair, which her fair brow divided 
As doth the sun a parting summer-storm. 



A KEEN SWIFT SPIRIT. Ill 

For but a moment that old awful shiver 
The heart takes from the presence of a wraith 

Of child's credulity seemed to deliver 
Him over to the bonds of childhood's faith. 

Near him she came ; she seemed with love to linger ; 

With raptured smile she stood beside him till, 

As if forgetting, with unghostly finger 

She touched his forehead. Through him ran a 
thrill 

From that warm touch, and up he sprang and 
caught her 

Fast in his arms. She strove not to arrest 

His fervor ; and, when full to light he brought her, 

He held the Medium weeping on his breast. 

With speech too shallow for a thought to swim in, 

In faith whose fiction made a fool of fact, 

That circle's long-haired men and short-haired 
women 

Huddled upon him and denounced his act. 

His arms then from her gently disengaging, 
Bleeding afresh at love's old murder-scars, 

He rushed, as from a mob of madmen raging, 
Out to the silent saneness of the stars. 



112 MISTS OF FIRE. 

O Stars ! as the flakes of a snowstorm, 

How ye fly, and fall, and drift ! 
Swift snowing of suns out of darkness, 

Whirled by winds of Force and whiffed ! 
Fly ! fall ! but the wind the Almighty 

Still behind you always runs, 
Still pushes you onward together, 

Fixed each sun in drift of suns. 

Fixed, ay! to the vision of mortal 

Never change hath shown in you : 
Seas, lands, and their kingdoms and races, 

All have changed, but ye are true ; 
Still true to the old constellations, 

Such as when man's forehead first 
Up lifted itself to their glories 

With this human spirit's thirst. 

Calm ! still ! though in every sparkle 

Motions like the thunderbolt, 
Vast, vast as our measures of heaven — 

Planet's wheel and comet's volt — 
All hang, as it were in a dewdrop 

Frozen to a steadfast gleam ; 
Place, time, braided in with the starlight, 

Whimseys of a far-off dream ! 



A KEEN SWIFT SPIRIT. 113 

Drift ! drift ! all the universe drifting 

Round some orb too vast for thought! 
On ! on ! awful maelstrom of matter ! 

Wheeling in a gulf of naught ! 
Whirl ! wheel ! and my soul like a seabird 

Flies across, and dips and flees — 
Wild wings of my soul, like the seabird's, 

Tost and lost upon the seas ! 



VI. 



As if dropped suddenly back into body — 

For this had thither groped, apart from him — 

He found his tired feet pressing those old soddy 
Paths of the churchyard in the twilight dim. 

Life's madness now death's sadness fell: the mad- 
ness 
That he had fled from, that had whirled and 
swung 

The swift stars round his soul, fell to the sadness 
Of the green graves that there he lay among. 

As thus he lay there looking up to starlight, 

Thus dreaming upward into heaven, appeared 

To him a strange gleam, whether near or far light, 

Within him or without him, strange and weird. 
8 



ii4 MISTS OF FIRE. 

Into himself he gazed, and saw it looming 
From far horizons, as a girdle drawn 

About the whole sky, opening and blooming 
From twilight into universal dawn. 



It rose and grew, and presently a thrilling 
Deliciousness of swiftness and a rush 

Of radiance overcame his nature, stilling 
His heartbeats into death's ecstatic hush. 



SOME ECLOGS 



SOME ECLOGS. 



RAIN ON THE ROOF. 

When the hovering humid darkness 

Over all the starry spheres 
Flows and falls like sorrow softly 

Breaking into blessed tears, 
Then how sweet to press the pillow 

Of a cottage-chamber bed 
And lie listening to the raindrops 

On the low roof overhead. 

To the pitpat on the shingles 

Answer echoes in the heart ; 
And dim dreamy recollections 

Into form and being start, 
And the busy fairy, Fancy, 

Weaves her air-threads, warp and woof, 
As I listen to the patter 

Of the light rain on the roof. 



118 RAIN ON THE ROOF. 

Now in memory comes my mother 

As she used in summers gone, 
Taking leave of little faces 

That her loving look shone on ; 
And I feel that fond look on me 

As I feel the old refrain 
Here repeated on the shingles 

By the patter of the rain. 

Then my little seraph-sister, 

With the wings and waving hair, 
And her star-eyed cherub-brother — 

A serene angelic pair — 
Glide around my wakeful pillow 

With sweet praise or mild reproof, 
As I shut my eyes and listen 

To the soft rain on the roof. 

And another comes, to thrill me 

With her eyes' bewitching blue, 
And I mind not, musing on her, 

That my heart she never knew; 
I remember but to love her 

With a passion kin to pain, 
And my quickened pulses quiver 

To the patter of the rain. 



RAIN ON THE ROOF. 119 

Art hath naught of tone or cadence, 

Naught of music's magic spell, 
That can thrill the secret fountain 

Whence the tears of rapture well, 
Like that weird nocturne of Nature, 

That subdued, subduing strain 
Which is played upon the shingles 

By the patter of the rain. 
1849 1899. 



120 SINGING FLAME. 



SINGING FLAME. 

A paean, Science ! Thy cunning has found 
(Cunning Science, a paean to thee !) 
Singing Flame, where the forces agree 

In all their marvelous protean round, 

Where light is to hear and sound is to see. 

Song and the soul of the world are the same ; 
Motion (the winged beginning of things) 
Is heat, by the sudden stop of its wings, 

And heat is motion replumed with flame, 
And song is flame that quivers and sings. 

As motion to heat, and heat to light, 

And light to flame of music is whirled, 
So the very flight of the stars is hurled 

Into song from the secrets of night, 

And song keeps touch with the light of the world. 

Ay, the soul of sound from the heart of fire 
Utters a flame, and the spirit hears 

Therein the light of a million years 

« 

Ago, sung down from the shining choir 
Of the morning-stars' jubilant spheres* 



SINGING FLAME. 121 

This is the light that old Wordsworth felt, 
Or dreamed with a vision keen and strong, 
Whose rays nor to land nor to sea belong, 

But into a flame of melody melt — 

Song that is flame and flame that is song. 



This is the light that was pillar of smoke, 

Or only pillar of fire at most, 

To the marching, camping, carousing host, 
But, when to the Red-Sea singer it spoke, 

Was a flaming tongue of the Holy Ghost. 

This is the light that Dante pursued 
Through all the lurid regions of hell ; 
That Milton saw in his blindness well; 

That our miraculous Shakespeare indued 
With a glory no mortal can tell. 

But the thin blue flame of these cultured years 
That shrinks and faints at the lilt of a breath, 
What is it this pale blue ardor saith 

Of fears that are hopes, and hopes that are fears, 
And of deeps that are deeper than death ? 



122 SINGING FLAME. 

Little it saith, and it singeth naught, 

But it creeps the ground along and about 
With delicate wreathings in and out, 

And flickers away in a swoon of thought, 
And dies in a dainty dream of doubt. 

And sometimes, too, it is hard to be told 
From lifted smoke, so it takes from Art 
Alone its aimless ethereal start; 
For it has no flaming and singing hold 
k On the core of fire at Nature's heart. 

O soul of that fire, O issue from night, 
And fuse all the twinklers, name by name, 
And melt to thy gold their azurine fame, 

And pour down the heavens in wine of light, 
And fill all the world with Singing Flame ! 



VESUVIUS. 123 



VESUVIUS. 

A PARABLE FOR THE WHITMANITES. 

Old Vesuvius, calmly possessing its forces primeval, 
Keeping them pent in its bosom as far, dim dreams 

of the passions 
Which in its youth it had vented in red molten out- 
bursts of thunder, 

Held its form and stood serene through ages and 

ages. 
Men had forgotten its ravages. Villages clustered 

about it. 

Peasantry climbed it with vineyards. The opulence, 
luxury, pleasure, 

Learning of dissolute Italy lolled in the charm of 
its outskirts. 

Spartacus banded his gladiatorial athletes for free- 
dom 

Once in the top of it — safe in its great, broad cup, 
which was empty 

Then, long then, of the wine of its wrath, where- 
withal it had staggered 

When, through its mad young years in carouse with 
its comrades Titanic, 



124 VESUVIUS. 

Ischia, Barbaro, Somma, Arsoni, and old Solfatara. 
Mediterranean winds blew balm through its or- 
chards and gardens. 

West, and north, and east it swung, from sunrise to 
sunset, 

Slowly about its shoulders its long, wide mantle of 

shadow, 
Shielding the men at their toil on the slopes and the 

birds at their singing. 
Far to the folk coming in on the ships it appeared a 

great pillar, 
Steadfast prop of blue roof of sky over blue floor 

of water, 
While, aland, it showed itself bulked on the world's 

gravitation, 
Fixed of form and poised serene through ages and 

ages. 

Suddenly then, with a bellowing frenzy, it panted 
out darkness 

Over itself and the land and the sea; as a priest 
gone apostate, 

Tore off its miter and hurled it (renouncing the faith 
with blaspheming) 

Down on the worshipers ; growing in rage, drew a 
dagger of lightning, 

Brandished, and slashed all its veins and bled hell- 
fire. And the people, 



VESUVIUS. 125 

Seeing sublimity gloom into horror, and day into 

midnight — 

Majesty topple from cosmical forms into rubbishy 
ruin — 

Rocks fly as meteors, chaos ejaculate flame, and 
with thunder 

Sputter plutonian ashes and scoriae cinders — the 
people 

Fled from the mountain, abandoning castle, and 
farmhouse, and villa, 

Stumbling their perilous ways through the roar, and 
the stench, and the blackness 

Out to the sun on the plain of Campania. Multi- 
tudes perished, 

Whelmed by the fire-flakes that fell from the clouds 
of the smoke like a snowing. 

Civilization forgot them for centuries. Stricken 
Pompeii, 

Borne down under the deluge infernal, and smoth- 
ered and buried, 

Sank out of memory, and no more was it known 
where its grave was. 



Now, after hundreds and hundreds of years, is un- 
earthed the dead city. 

Matter that once flew as flame in the heavens and 
startled an empire, 



126 VESUVIUS. 

Dig it up, shovel it, cart it away, it is dirt and 
obstruction, 

Hiding the relics of man and the rare forms of art 
he has fashioned. 

Here in the marl is the mold of an old Roman sen- 
tinel's body, 

Now more than eighteen centuries dead at the post 

of his duty. 
Here is the exquisite ring of a bride whose love is 

immortal. 

Here is the beautiful dwelling of Sallust. Here the- 
ater, forum, 

Where Rome's language, whose ghost, from the 
Church, still haunteth the nations, 

Lived on the stage and the rostrum — in greeting of 

neighbor to neighbor — 
Shouted the plays of the school-children here in the 

streets. And the temples, 
Here they stand in the full broad day of the worship 

of Jesus, 
Shockingly waked from their obsolete gods as from 

dreams in a nightmare. 

What the spontaneous gush from yon old and famil- 
iar volcano, 

Violent, formless, beside these reminders of man and 
his labors? 

Yet the volcano had covered all these and preserved 
them for ages. 



THE SEA-POWER. 127 



THE SEA-POWER. 

American, English, Old-Teuton are we ; 

Kindred race, the same speech, and like law make 
us one, 
And old wars with each other have made us both 

free: 
So, for freedom as one let our two banners be 
Wheresoever the tides of the high seas run, 
Flag with flag, ship with ship, and great gun with 
great gun. 

Let the old Union-Jack with Old Glory ally, 

Asking not of the past which was right or which 
wrong, 

And the two on the sea may together defy 

All the flags all the rest of the Powers can fly, 

And command the peace to their lands for as long 

As the Eagle is swift and the Lion is strong. 

To ally for the help and not for the harm 

Of the peace of all lands and their freedom and 
right, 
To dispel one another's distrust and alarm, 



128 THE SEA-POWER. 

To impel one another in trust to disarm, 

And to rid their taxed toil of war's burden and 

blight- 
Only that be the Sea-Power's mission of might. 

As the Sea-Power goes with the sea round the 
world, 

With the sea round the lands and between land 
and land, 

To the lands from the sea (where its flags are un- 
furled) 

Its mandates shall come as the billows are hurled 

On the beach or in ripples received on the sand — 

As the right to persuade or the might to com- 
mand. 

Such the Anglo-American Sea-Power be! 

Let its flags on the sea fly together as one — 

Though as two on the land, always one on the sea — 

Ay, America, England, Japan, may the three 

Flock together wherever the high seas run, 

Flag with flag, ship with ship, and great gun with 

great gun. 
1898. 



THE W00DB1RD. 129 



THE WOODBIRD. 

Oh! wildwood, wildwood, wildwood! 
It is a weird note so repeated; 

Lyric startled from its theme ; 
A song by some faint shock defeated, 
Or perchance the uncompleted 

Sad forgetting of a dream. 

Give sunlight for the lark and robin, 
Sun, and sky, and mead, and bloom ; 

But give, for this rare throat to throb in 

And this lonesome soul to sob in, 

Wildwoods, with their green and gloom, 

Oh! wildwood, wildwood, wildwood! 
In dim ravines he flits and perches, 

And he listens in the glen, 
And, like a palmer in old churches, 
All the solemn shrines he searches 

For remission and amen. 

9 



130 THE WOODBIRD. 

Within great trees he sits and ponders 

Melodies his heart receives, 
Till all in that one trill he squanders — 
Echo of the dream that wanders 
Through the silent sleep of leaves. 

Oh! wildwood, wildwood y wildwood! 
That strain of his is his despairing 

Of how little can be told ; 
Yet that is more than all the daring, 
Loud, familiar throats' declaring 

With their bugle-notes of gold. 

All these the mockbird catches featly ; 

Keen roulade and warbled whim 
He strings upon his carol sweetly, 
But my woodbird's cry completely 

Flieth and eludeth him. 



For this is voicing of such places 

As the mimic never sees ; 
A rune of old Druidic traces, 
Chant from old cathedral spaces 
In a thousand years of trees. 



THE W00DB1RD. 131 

Oh! wildwood, wildzvood, wildwood! 
Were he to you his music bringing, 

You might fault his monotone ; 
But not to you his little singing 
Soul of fire its flame is flinging — 

Sings he for himself alone. 



132 OUR ONLY DAY. 



OUR ONLY DAY. 

Were this our only day, 

Did not our yesterdays and morrows give 
To hope and memory their interplay, 

How should we bear to live? 



Not merely what we are, 

But what we were and what we are to be, 
Makes up our life — the far days each a star, 

The near days nebulae. 



At once would love forget 

Its keen pursuits and coy delays of bliss, 
And its delicious pangs of fond regret, 

Were there no day but this. 



And who, to win a friend, 

Would to the secrets of his heart invite 
A fellowship that should begin and end 

Between a night and night? 



OUR ONLY DAY. 133 

Who, too, would pause to prate 

Of insult or remember slight or scorn, 

Who would this night lie down to sleep with hate, 
Were there to be no morn? 



Who would take heed to wrong, 
To misery's complaint or pity's call, 

The long wail of the weak against the strong, 
If this one day were all ? 



And what were wealth with shame, 
The vanity of office, pride of caste, 

The winy sparkle of the bubble fame, 
If this day were the last? 



Ay, what were all days worth, 

Were there no looking backward or before ; 
If every human life that drops to earth 

Were lost forevermore? 



But each day is a link 

Of days that pass and never pass away : 
For memory and hope — to live, to think — 

Each is our only day. 



134 OHIO CEXTEXXIAL ODE. 



OHIO CEXTEXXIAL ODE. 



Delivered in the Coliseum, Columbus, O., on the Opening 
Day, September 4th, 1888, of the State cele- 
bration of the Centennial Year. 



In what historic thousand years of man 

Has there been builded such a State as this? 
Yet, since the clamor of the axes ran 

Along the great woods, with the groan and hiss 
And crash of trees, to hew thy groundsels here, 

Ohio, but a century has gone, 
And thy republic's building stands the peer 

Of any that the sun and stars shine on. 
Xot on a fallen empire's rubbish-heap, 

Not on old quicksands wet with blood of wrong, 
Do the foundations of thy structure sleep, 

But on a ground of nature, new r and strong. 
Men that had faced the Old World seven years 

In battle on the Old World turned their backs 
And, quitting Old- World thoughts and hopes and 
fears, 

With only rifle, powder-horn, and axe 



OHIO CENTENNIAL ODE. 135 

For tools of civilization, won their way 

Into the wilderness, against wild man and beast, 
And laid the wood-glooms open to the day, 

And from the sway of savagery released 
The land to nobler uses of a higher race ; 

Where Labor, Knowledge, Freedom, Peace, and 
Law 
Have wrought all miracles of dream in place 

And time — ay, more than ever dream foresaw. 



A hundred years of Labor ! Labor free ! 

Our River ran between it and the Curse, 
And freemen proved how toil can glory be. 
The heroes that Ohio took to nurse 

(As the she-wolf the founders of old Rome) — 
Their deeds of fame let history rehearse 
And oratory celebrate ; but see 

This paradise their hands have made our home ! 
Nod, plumes of wheat, wave, banderoles of corn, 
Toss, orchard-oriflammes, swing, wreaths of vine, 
Shout, happy farms, with voice of sheep and kine, 

For the old victories conquered here on these 
The fields of Labor when, ere we were born, 
The fathers fought the armies of the trees, 
And, chopping out the night, chopt in the morn ! 



136 OHIO CENTENNIAL ODE. 

A hundred years of Knowledge ! We have mixt 

More brains with Labor in the century 
Than man had done since the decree was fixt 

That labor was his doom and dignity. 
All honor to those far-foreworking men 

Who, as they stooped their sickles in to fling, 

Or took the wheat upon their cradles' swing, 
Thought of the boy, the little citizen 
There gathering sheaves, and planned the school for 
him, 

Which should wind up the clockwork of his mind 
To cunning moves of wheels and blades that skim 

Across the fields, and reap, and rake, and bind ! 
They planned the schools — the woods were full of 
schools ! 

Our learning has not soared, but it has spread : 
Ohio's intellects are sharpened tools 

To deal with daily fact and daily bread. 
The starry peaks of knowledge in thin air 

Her culture has not climbed, but on the plain, 
In whatsoever is to do or dare 

With mind or matter, there behold her reign. 
The axemen who chopt out the clearing here 

Where stands the Capital, could they today 

Arise and see our hundred years' display — 
Steam-wagons in their thundering career — 



OHIO CENTENNIAL ODE. 137 

Wires that a friend's voice waft across a State, 
And wires wherein imprisoned lightnings wait 

To leap forth at the turning of a key — 
Could they these shows of mind in matter note, 

Machines that almost conscious souls confess, 

Seeming to will and think — the printing-press, 
Not quite intelligent enough to vote — 
Could they arise these marvels to behold, 

What would to them the past Republic seem — 
The State historified in volumes old, 

Or prophesied in Grecian Plato's dream ? 



A hundred years of Freedom ! Freedom such 
No other people on the earth had known 
Till our America the world had shown 

What Freedom meant. No foot of slave might 
touch 

Our earth, no master's lash outrage our heaven : 
The Declaration of the Great July, 

Fired by our Ordinance of Eightyseven, 

Flamed from the River to the northern sky ; — 

Ay, that flame rose against the arctic stars, 
And shone a new aurore across the land. 

A Body scored with stripes of whip and scars 
Of branding-iron seemed to understand — 



138 OHIO CENTENNIAL ODE. 

Soulless though reckoned by our Union's pact— 

That It was Man, for whom that heavenly sign 
Lit up the North; and while the bloodhounds 
tracked 

Him footsore through Kentucky, stars benign 
Befriended him and brought him to our shore, 

A stranger, frightened, hungry, travel-worn ; 
And we laid hands on him and gave him o'er 

Again to bondage, as in fealty sworn. 
So rich in freedom, we had none to give ! 

While we might quaff, we could not pass the cup : 
No slave should touch foot on our soil and live 

Upon it slave — he must be given up ! 
When that first man was wrested from our State, 

Then slavery had crossed the Rubicon ; 
Then Freedom was the whole Republic's fate ; 

Then John Brown's soul began its marching-on ; 
Then the 'Ohio Idea' had to go 

Where'er the banner of the Union flew, 
From northmost limits in Alaskan snow 

To southmost in the Mexic waters blue. 

A hundred years of Peace ! Yes, less the four 
(Our little Indian squabbles were not war), 

The four when we, in battle's shock and roar, 
Declared that Freedom was worth dying for. 



OHIO CENTENNIAL ODE. 139 

Ohio gave to that great fight for Man 
Her Grant, her Sherman, and her Sheridan, 
And her victorious hundred thousands more. 
Victorious, yes, though legions of them sleep 

In garments rolled in blood on foughten fields — 
Though still the mothers and the widows weep 

For the slain heroes borne home on their shields. 
Their glorious victory this day behold : 

They conquered Peace; and where their manly 
frays 
Across the land of bondage stormed and rolled, 

Millions of grateful freedmen hymn their praise. 
Ohio honors them with happy tears : 
The battles that they braved for her, 
The banner that they waved for her, 
The freedom that they saved for her, 
Shall keep their laurels green a thousand years. 

A hundred years of Law ! The people's will, 

The might of the majority, 

*The right of the minority, 

The light hand with authority 
We promised, with the purpose to fulfill. 
But the contagion of the border-taint 

Blackened our statutes with its shameful stain, 



140 OHIO CENTENNIAL ODE. 

And left the color of our conscience faint 

Till freshened by the battle-storm's red rain. 

Ay, war has legislated ; it has cast 

The 'White Man's Government' out into night, 

And Labor, Knowledge, Freedom, Peace, at last 
Stand color-blind in Law's resplendent light. 

Now hail, my State of States ! thy justice wins — 

Thy justice and thy valor now are one ; 
Thou hast arisen, and thy little sins 

Are spots of darkness lost upon the sun. 
Thy sun is up — O, may it never set ! — 

These hundred years were but thy morning-red 
It shall be forenoon for thy glory yet 

When all who this day look on thee are dead. 
O, splendor of the noon awaiting thee ! 
O, rights of man and hights of manhood free ! 
Hail, beautiful Ohio that shalt be ! 

Hail ! Ship of State ! and take our parting cheers 
Ah, God ! that we might gather here to see 

Thy sails loom in swoln with a thousand years ! 



THE LAST MEETING. 141 



THE LAST MEETING. 

I met you last night on a lone country road ; 
The fields either side were green with the May, 
The birds were full song (you had made the night 
day), 

And a sapphire sky with a golden sun glowed. 

And you hurried to me in your fine old way — 
Imperious passion aflame I could see 
In your eyes as of old, when in love were we — 

And you seized my arm and commanded me, 
"Stay!" 

And you questioned, "What is it you ask of me?" 
You clung to me close as we walked, and each 
side 

The birds from the thickets and treetops replied, 
Singing, "Love ! the old love ! only love asks he !" 

Then your brow grew stern and you bitterly cried, 

"There is darkness between us!" — and sleep 
closed in : 

I awoke in the dark where the dream had been, 

And watched all alone till the sad night died. 



142 CHILD LOST. 



CHILD LOST. 

She came the sweet fulfillment of a dream ; 

She bloomed upon me like a flower; 

Her life was my life's gift and dower, 
Her love was my love's meed supreme. 

She seemed a precious memory of mine 
Waked from the holiness of death 
And quickened back to pulse and breath 

By working of love's miracle divine. 

I took her babehood as a gift of God ; 
And when her tiny toddling feet 
Began my coming-home to meet, 

My heart lay under every step she trod. 

Her life was light to me where night had been ; 
It was herself she heralded 
When from her little crib she said 

Each morning, "Papa, light is coming in." 

She was a newness and a solace deep — 

A newness like the dawning light, 
A solace like the lulling night, 
A joy like waking, and a bliss like sleep. 



CHILD LOST. 143 

Her being was around me as a sky 

Of summer is around the earth : 

I never thought of any worth 
Of life without her love to price it by. 

But suddenly I missed the child one day ; 

I looked, and lo a stranger stood 

There stately in full womanhood 
Where I had left the little maid at play. 



144 MARS. 



MARS— AUGUST 1892. 

Thou splendid sparkle of the sun, 
Noon-lighted hemisphere of golden Mars, 
Now once again thou from the farther stars 

Thy hithermost career hast run. 



Thou blazest to our Aryan eyes 
Not as on Hindoo-Koosh or on the slope 
Of old Armenia, ere the telescope 

Fetched down to us the upper skies. 



Nor art thou more a flaming targe, 
As for old Latin Mavors, god of war, 
Or for the old Norse god of thunder, Thor, 

To dazzle in the battle-charge. 



For science now sees thee a world, 
And fancy peoples thee with brother-men, 
As thou and Earth approach and greet again, 

Nearest the solar center whirled. 



MARS. 145 

O ship of heaven, as we go by, 
Might we across the deep some signal show 
To let the voyagers upon thee know 

That not alone they sail the sky ! 

But what they are to us we are 
To them, a glory-mystery of the night — 
The rising and the setting of a light, 

Their morning and their evening star. 

Dead silence, and all-killing cold, 
And twoscore million miles of twixt-abyss 
Shall still the race of that world and of this 

Forever from each other hold. 

Although that sunlit globe may swarm 
With myriads of living, on its face 
Our glasses glimpse, from this terrestrial place, 

Not even a mote of living form. 

Who holds his head among the stars 

With pride of fame or fortune here on Earth 

May well take estimation of his worth 

By looking at himself from Mars. 
10 



146 THE SHADOW. 



THE SHADOW. 

When first I saw my soul it was the sun 
Just risen from the underworld of light ; 

I did not see the Shadow which had then begun 
To go with me a heritage of night. 

My face was toward the morn, the birds in song 
Set me to music, while that Shadow's black 

Sketch of my small new self lay large along 
The level of the future at my back. 

All forenoon still I faced my mounting soul, 
My southward sun, and scarcely was aware 

Of this dark wraith which northward round me stole 
And seemed to creep to me from out the air. 

At noon I turned, and close before my feet 
The shortened Shadow faint and feeble lay : 

So much my life's meridian light and heat 
Had wrought the power of darkness into day. 

With ardor now I seek the sun once more, 
As down the slope of afternoon it wheels ; 

But, though my feet seem flame-winged as before, 
I feel the Shadow dogging at my heels. 



THE SHADOW. 147 

I feel the Shadow, and I find my face 

Turn toward it and my back turn toward the 
light; 
I see the Shadow lengthen to retrace 

My path across the day from night to night. 



148 OLD GLORY. 



OLD GLORY. 

Written for the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the 

United States, and Dedicated to the Com- 

mandery of Ohio, May 6, 1891. 

When hope unfurled thee rainbow-barred, 
Red, white, and blue, and thirteen-starred, 

Gloria ! Old Gloria ! 
The Fathers pledged their lives to guard 
Thy sacred folds, though battle-scarred, 
And hand thy glory down unmarred, 

Gloria ! Old Gloria ! 

Flag of the Declaration when 
The sword was whetted with the pen, 

Gloria ! Old Gloria ! 
Flag of the Constitution then ! 
To hold the old stars three and ten, 
And double them again, again, 

Gloria! Old Gloria! 

But when from thee some went to fall 
The legions moved at Lincoln's call, 
Gloria! Old Gloria! 



OLD GLORY. 149 

With bayonets round thee a wall, 
They struck the chains from every thrall, 
And fixed the stars for good and all, 
Gloria ! Old Gloria ! 



By that supreme American 
Slain in the hour of mercy's plan, 

Gloria ! Old Gloria ! 
By Grant, and Sherman, Sheridan, 
And all the dead, both chief and man, 
We wave thee still in freedom's van, 

Gloria! Old Gloria! 



By all our living heroes, too, 
Who stood to thee in battle true, 

Gloria ! Old Gloria ! 
Who pined for thee the prisons through, 
And suffered more than death could do — 
We hoist Old Glory high for you ! 

Gloria! Old Gloria! 



And when all these, as soon they must, 

March on, march on to join the just, 

Gloria ! Old Gloria ! 



150 OLD GLORY. 

When their old guns and swords are rust, 
Heaven hold thee still our country's trust, 
And kiss thee proud above their dust, 
Gloria! Old Gloria! 



Thee as an angel's pinion fair 
We will for peace with honor bear, 

Gloria ! Old Gloria ! 
But if a foe thy war shall dare, 
Make him in sorrow thee declare 
Prince of the powers of the air, 

Gloria ! Old Gloria ! 

Flag of the Union, float and fly 
O'er land and sea in all the sky, 

Gloria! Old Gloria! 
And as thy State-stars multiply, 
Group them together all so nigh 
That they shall blaze one sun on high, 

Old Glory! Glory! Gloria! 



CYGNI CARMEN MORITURI. 151 



CYGNI CARMEN MORITURI. 

Ocean ! I feel it — I hear in my spirit 
Echoing pulse of its billows that thunder 

In on the beaches, and now, as I near it, 
Hope in me rises, and longing, and wonder. 

What it is like I have dreamed, but I know not — 
Vastness, and silence, and freedom, and motion, 

Tides that flow on, and abysses that flow not — 
All I shall see, I shall be of the ocean ! 

Stream that hast wafted me, widening River, 
Hither from inland afar where thy source is, 

Far thou hast wafted me, here to deliver 

Me to the sea, where the end of thy course is. 



Me and my memories — fountain-brook plashings, 
Pauses in pools through the cool woods, and sal- 
lies 

Thence along rapids, down waterfalls' dashings, 
Out to the gliding of creeks in the valleys ; 



152 CYGNI CARMEN MORITURL 

Flocking with kindred in blue lakes, and nesting 

Oft on the summer-green shores, but returning 

Ever to follow the flow never-resting 

(Life's with thy current's flow oceanward yearn- 
ing)— 

Me and my memories, sicknesses, sorrows, 
Old age's loneliness, all thou art bringing 

Down to the deep and the night — but tomorrow's 
Joy of the sea in my spirit is singing ! 



SEA-SONNETS TOWARD ITALY. 153 



SEA-SONNETS TOWARD ITALY. 

To My Daughters on the Atlantic. 



You seem to go across the gulf of death 

Which parts the two worlds ; for it is as though 
You had died yesterday and here below 

We were expecting when your spirit-breath 

Should pulse back through the dark to make us 
know 

That you were traversing the deep no more, 
No more were passing from this world of ours, 

But had arrived safe on the happy shore. 
Could I feel forward to that land of flowers, 

Dream over to that Florence waiting you, 
Sleep over seas and nights and days between, 

To wake in Italy and greet you two, 
I would forego the life to intervene, 
So to forefeel and dream and sleep serene. 

Xenia, 2 October, 1890. 



154 SEA-SONNETS TOWARD ITALY. 

II. 

Today I saw the sun rise, and it brought 

Back to my memory, poppied yet with sleep, 
The sudden thought of you upon the deep ; 

The great sun rose from you a sudden thought 
To fill the world again. I seemed to leap 

Its level rays and ride them to your sky 
Of forenoon : from its orb I looked down thence 

And spied your ship thereunder going by. 
I would have given you intelligence 

From home, could I have conjured on that orb 
A spot shaped throbbing from this heart of mine 

And on your hearts a magic to absorb 
The meaning of it. But the dazzling shine 
Was all you saw of my sun-dream divine. 

Xenia, 4 October, 1890. 



Ill 



Did I not realize, as you do now 

By your straight speed east on it these four days, 
How vast the world is, I should dread the haze 

Which glooms this morning ; but your vessel's prow 
May point to clear sun, and its forenoon-blaze 



SEA-SONNETS TOWARD ITALY. 155 

May pour your sea-floored sky-tent full of gold : 
So there for you were youth and Orient, 

While west the sad sky mists, and I am old. 
I dream it so ; but dreams do not content ; 

For in my thought, clouds darken, great winds rise, 
And billows toss you, and I long to stand 

Beside you there, and hold you in my eyes, 
And cling to you with father's heart and hand, 
Dear mariners a thousand miles from land ! 

Xenia, 5 October, 1890. 



IV. 



No stars here last night, and another day 
Has risen westering from you to stain 
The blue with scud of clouds betokening rain ; 

Contrary breezes whiffle, and I pray 
They east not into gales to dance the main 

Of the Atlantic — But, lo now amid 
This line, they blow away the curtaining dark 

In tatters, and let sunlight that was hid 

Peep through by snatches ; and again your bark 

Catches joy-sparkles from my swells of hope, 
Which heave and help you shoreward; and I 
dream 



156 SEA-SOXXETS TOWARD ITALY, 

You fleeting down the round world's water-slope 
Safe into haven: soon a lightning-gleam 
With greets from you shall through the ocean 
stream ! 

Xenia, 6 October, 1890. 



OLD VIRGINIA. 157 



OLD VIRGINIA. 

O Virginia! Mother of Liberty! 
What memories surround thee ! 
What glories have crowned thee! 

What honor and praise 
When thy great Burgess Henry stood 
And spoke, for all the sisterhood 

Of the old colonial days, 
Words that were not merely breath, 
Words that thy grand history saith — 
'Give me liberty or give me death!' 
The Revolution round thee formed; 

Thou took its battles on thy breast, 

And on thy plumed defiant crest 
The fiercest British thunder stormed. 
Thou wast in when the fight began 
For our America's freedom of man; 

And through it all there stood thy sons 

With thy sisters' bravest, foremost ones; 
Ay, to thee at home and in the van 

The foe surrendered his guns. 
The great Republic of the Free 
Can never lose its pride in thee 

And thy past, Old Virginia! 



158 OLD VIRGINIA, 

O Virginia, Mother of Washington! 
How blest among mothers! 
More blest than all others 

Of story and song 
When heaven on thy bosom smiled 
And thou brought forth the chief man-child 

Of these many centuries long. 
Thine his wise and manly youth, 
Thine his chivalry and truth, 
Thine his fame, intact of Envy's tooth, 
And proof against the tooth of Time. 

Such manhood's majesty and weight 

Made Old Dominion of thy State, 
And made thy leadership sublime. 
Thou didst great, but thy greatest deed, 
When our America's uttermost need 

Demanded greatest deeds be done, 

Was thy gift to her of Washington ; 
For the Nation under his strong lead 

Became the Many in One ; 
The life, deeds, words, that Union meant, 
The Union's Captain, President, 

Were thy gift, Old Virginia! 



OLD VIRGINIA. 159 

O Virginia, Mother of Jefferson! 
The grand Declaration 
Which gave to the Nation 

Its birth among men, 
Thou hast the glory, too, of that 
In thy illustrious Democrat 

Who was Old Virginia's pen 
Rights of manhood to express — 
Rights of all men to possess 
Life, and liberty, and happiness. 
A strong young eagle's voice it went 

Out on the glad winds to impeach 

The ancient tyrannies and preach 
The gospel of new government. 
That Great Writ was the one more act 
For our American liberties' pact 

Which gives us claim on thee to call 

For monition to the Union all 
That from Jefferson our faith and fact 

Of freedom never shall fall; 
Thy breast's old loyal battle-rents, 
Thy motherhood of Presidents, 

Speak for thee, Old Virginia! 



160 THE END OF THE RAINBOW. 



THE END OF THE RAINBOW. 

There is a rare region 
Whose heavenward scope 

Holds legion on legion 
Of angels of hope — 

At the end of the rainbow. 

Endure the dull present, 
Its toil, moil, and sorrow! 

We shall all find that pleasant 
Elysium tomorrow — 

At the end of the rainbow. 

There the sky never varies 
From glory to gloom ; 

There groves and green prairies 
Eternally bloom — 
At the end of the rainbow. 

The bees hive no honey 

In that happy land ; 
For the days are all sunny, 

The air always bland — 
At the end of the rainbow. 



THE END OF THE RAINBOW. 161 

There Hope climbs the mountains 

And rests in the sky ; 
There Peace drinks at fountains 

That never go dry — 
At the end of the rainbow. 



There joys above measure 

Are blisses benign ; 
There life's ruby, pleasure, 

Melts into sweet wine — 
At the end of the rainbow. 



There Love from its madness 

Of longing and moan 
Leaps whole in the gladness 

Of finding its own — 

At the end of the rainbow. 



No shadow Cimmerian 

Of ignorance there ; 
But full the Pierian 

Spring jets in the air — 
At the end of the rainbow. 



11 



162 THE EXD OF THE RAINBOW. 

There glitter the riches 
That time never rusts; 

There glory's proud niches 
Are filled with our busts — 
At the end of the rainbow. 

Endure the dull present, 
Its toil, moil, and sorrow ; 

We shall all find the pleasant 
Elysium tomorrow — 

At the end of the rainbow. 



IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 163 



IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 

You ask, in scorn, if life is worth the living. 

But tell me, then, what is it you call life? 
Is it the joy of getting or of giving? 

Is it repose of thought or thrill of strife? 

Who toils from rising of the sun to setting, 

And robs his nights of peace, and murders sleep, 

Giving his whole soul to the greed of getting, 
Gets no possession that the soul can keep. 

The young rich man who turned away in sadness 
When Jesus bade him all his riches give 

Had never tasted how the heavenly gladness 
Of making others glad helps one to live. 

His life is not worth living who remembers 
No other living than of self and sense ; 

To kindle warmth and light in such dead embers 
Were past the power of Omnipotence. 

Nor deem that in pursuit of pure thought solely 
(The palefaced passions back of prison-bars) 

You ever reach the hight of living wholly ; 
Go forth in night and think among the stars ! 



164 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 

If majesties of worlds there do not crush you, 
Nor miracles of distance hold you fast, 

Nor mysteries of motion awe and hush you, 
You are not living then in thought, at last. 

Yet if you were, the keen eternal yearning 
To know what never can be known would make 

A mockery of all your little learning — 
The thirst that no Pierian spring can slake. 

But, since high thinking is not life's fruition, 
Try action — Is not that the life indeed ? 

To struggle for the prizes of ambition? 
To rule in council or in battle lead? 

Ah, vanity! on wings of fancy rising, 

Behold earth through a million miles of air — 

Man and the monuments of his devising 
All blank and silent in her moony glare. 

But then? There is, above the life's illusions, 
Above its greed and strife and pride, above 

Death and the grave and faith's and doubt's confu- 
sions, 
One life worth living — love, love's joy of love. 



THE HAUNTING VOICE. 165 



THE HAUNTING VOICE. 

The voice of a woman forever 
Runs sobbing after my soul ; 

Night or day, day or night, I can never 
Escape its mournful control; 
Its moaning musical dole 

Pursues me for ever and ever. 



It comes to my memory mingling 

With words it uttered of yore, 
When its tones through my pulses went tingling 

With thrills felt never before — 

With thrills felt now nevermore, 
Not even in home's holy mingling. 

Says the sorrowful voice, "O my darling, 

Did love that being endow 
Whose prattle outcarols the starling 

And makes home happier now? 

You took the marital vow, 
And you gave me to die, O my darling !" 



166 THE HAUNTING VOICE. 

So forever this voice of a woman 

Cries desolately to me — 
This voice as really human 

As voice of human can be ! 

No matter whither I flee, 
Still I hear this voice of a woman. 

Down to death and the sepulcher's portal 
This voice shall follow my sin — 

O, what if the voice is immortal, 
And, where hope's blisses begin, 
Shall come and welcome me in 

With joy through the heavenly portal! 



CONSUMMATION. 167 



CONSUMMATION. 

Death had sunk the world from under my feet; 

Love had given thee wings to fly ; 
And we met as the dawn and the darkness meet- 

Thou the dawn, and the darkness I. 



My soul was a gloom that had blotted heaven; 

And thine was a fine ascending fire 
That streamed it through with a luminous leaven 

Of hope of morning and day's desire. 



Love wrought the miracle of raising the dead ; 

Though on the tomb the seal had been put, 
Thine eyes to my buried passion said, 

'Come forth !' and it came, bound hand and foot. 



Sad memory drowned itself in those eyes — 
Fell into their liquid deeps and sunk ; 

And the darkness of all the earth and skies 
To those two crystals of darkness shrunk. 



168 COXSUMMATIOX. 

When we met our fate — rememberst the place? 

My day was barren, my dream was done ; 
But the bright warm flush of thy radiant face 

On my frozen heart flamed like a sun. 

That look ! it created the world anew : 
Thy presence came to me like the sweep 

Of a full white sail to the sudden view 
Of a shipwrecked man on the deep. 

I knew I was saved : I knew that thy voice 
Should sing the cries in the night to peace ; 

But I felt it almost a guilt to rejoice 

That love from the dead had love's release. 



Thou hadst never suffered., and couldst not know 
How past and present in me were whirled — 

How the breeze out of sunrise seemed to blow 
From the sundown of the underworld. 



But Love is a god, and to him one day 
Is a thousand years that are past : 

I woke from the dreams that had flown away, 
And., behold, they were true at last. 



CONSUMMATION. 169 

It seemed we had dwelt in the Morningstar 

Ere the soul of either was born ; 
And I saw thy face in glimmerings far 

Of memory's earliest morn. 



The barefooted little damsel that played 
With me in the plash on the marge 

Of the blue Ke-u-ka was flashed and rayed 
In the beam of this love so large. 



Thy passionate voice, so sweetly that robbed 
My soul of its will and made it slave, 

Was the girl Fanny Wolcott's when she sobbed 
My heart from me at her father's grave. 

The victorious eyes that once I had met 

And mistaken for heavenly blue 
Were dark as that night I remember yet, 

Because they were thine and were true. 



Thou seemed the soul after death from the eve 
When we strolled Miami's green shore 

And heard the cricket and katydid grieve 
That with them we should tryst no more. 



170 CONSUMMATION. 

The two strong loves that had fought for my heart 
And at last laid them down and smiled 

To divide and rend it to graves apart 
Arose in thee and were reconciled. 

From kiss on the sweet sad face in the night, 
From tears for the night-wind's human moan, 

O ! the waking to find, in love's new light, 
All faces, all voices thy own! 



ESSAYS IN LITERAL TRANSLATION. 171 



ESSAYS IN LITERAL TRANSLATION OF 
HOMERIC METERS. 

ILIAD I. 1-32. 

Sing, O goddess, the wrath of the Peleidean 
Achilles, 

Deadly, that brought innumerable sorrows upon 
the Achaians, 

Sending untimely the mighty souls many of heroes 
to Hades, 

And of the heroes themselves making ravin for dogs 

and for birds feast — 
Yet, too, the counsel of Zeus was fulfilling — from 

when first in quarrel 
Parted Atreides, chief of the warriors, and godlike 

Achilles. 

Which of the gods was it set them contending 

together in quarrel ? 
, It was the son of Leto and Zeus ; for, against the 

chief angered, 
All through the camp he inflicted a plague, and the 

soldiers were dying, 



172 ESSAYS IN LITERAL TRANSLATION. 

Since unto Chryses (the priest) had Atreides done a 
dishonor. 

For he had come to the Achaians' fleet ships to de- 
liver his daughter, 

He, that priest, and had brought gifts of ransom un- 
told, with a fillet 

Held in his hands on a truncheon of gold, as the 
badge of Apollo, 

Far-shooting archer, and suppliant pleaded with all 
the Achaians, 

But above all with the two sons of Atreus, the 
army's commanders: 
"O Atreides twain and ye others, ye well- 
greaved Achaians, 

Pray I indeed that the gods, who have their abode 
on Olympus, 

Give you to plunder the city of Priam and well to 
fare homeward, 

Only I pray you release my dear child and accept 
these her ransom, 

Holding in reverence Zeus's son, far-shooting 
archer Apollo." 

Then all the other Achaians assentingly 
shouted in favor 
Both of revering the priest and of taking the bounti- 
ful ransom. 



ESSAYS IN LITERAL TRANSLATION. 173 

This, though, pleased not the mind of the Atreus- 
son Agamemnon, 

But with abuse he sent him away and in stern 
speech charged him: 

"Let not me, old man, in the midst of the hol- 
low ships find thee, 

Either delaying now or back again coming here- 
after, 

Lest thee haply the deity's mace and fillet defend 
not. 

But this girl I will not release ; ay, rather shall old 
age 

Come upon her, afar from her country, in our home 
at Argos, 

Plying to and fro at the loom and my bed for me 
serving. 

But go; do not provoke me, that safe thou be in 
departing/' 



ILIAD III. 421-436. 

So, when they reached Alexandros's passingly- 
beautiful mansion, 

Forthwith then did the handmaids turn to their 
tasks, but the lady, 



174 ESS A YS IN LI TERAL TRANS LA TION. 

She the divine one of women, went into the high- 
vaulted chamber. 

And, then getting a chair for her, smile-loving 

Aphrodite 
Brought it, the goddess, and set it down so as to 

face Alexandros. 
There Helen took her seat, aegis-bearing Zeus's 

daughter, 
Backward turning her eyes, and tauntingly spoke to 

her husband : 
"So, thou hast come from the battle; thou 

oughtest thy life to have lost there, 
Slain at the hands of the warrior strong who once 

was my husband. 
Ere now, surely, thy boast was that thou didst ex- 
cel Menelaos 
Favored-of-Ares, both with thy strength, and hands, 

and war-spear; 
Nay, but go now and give Menelaos the favored-of- 

Ares 
Challenge again to confront thee in battle — But no, 

I, even I urge 
Thee to refrain and not in close combat with blond 

Menelaos 
Recklessly fight, lest quickly by him with the spear 

thou be vanquished." 



ESSAYS IN LITERAL TRANSLATION. 175 



ILIAD VIII. 542-565. 

Hector thus harangued, and loudly the Trojans 
applauded. 
Then they the sweating steeds loosed from the 
yoke, and with halters they fastened 

Each beside his car his own ; and they had from the 
city 

Oxen and great sheep speedily driven and heart- 
honey wine got, 

Bread, too, out of their homes, and large store of 
firewood they gathered. 

Then to the gods immortal they sacrificed heca- 
tombs perfect, 

Whose steam-savor the winds bore out of the plain 
into heaven. 

And, high-hearted, upon the between-line ridges of 
battle 

All night long they sat, and their watchfires many 
were burning. 

And, as when in the heavens the stars shine forth 
resplendent 

Round the bright moon, when the air on high is 
without any wind's breath ; 

Plain all the mountain-peaks show, and the fore- 
lands' ends, and the valleys ; 



176 ESSAYS IN LITERAL TRANSLATION. 

And from the heavens the infinite deep of the air 
overhead breaks, 

Where are seen all the stars, and the shepherd at 
heart is delighted ; 

So in the midst from the ships to the streams of the 
Xanthos the watchfires 

Manifold lit by the Trojans appeared before Ilios 
blazing. 

Ay, by the thousand the watchfires blazed in the 
plain, and beside them, 

Fifty beside each fire, the men sat in the glare of 
the flame-light. 

There too the steeds stood champing the white bar- 
ley-grain and the spelt-seed 

Fast by their chariots, waiting the Dawn-goddess 
throned in glory. 



MY LORD. 177 



MY LORD. 

Ennobled? O Lord Alfred Tennyson! — 
Now dare the curse, dig Shakespeare's bones 
From underneath the Stratford-stones 

And with a lordship prank the skeleton ! 

Men well may jeer and ask how thou has gained 
The right to have thy race renewed 
And thy old Saxon red blood blued 

By royal warrant, clarified, and strained. 

What hast thou done that goes to make a lord ? 
The greatness by estate-in-tail 
Which Nature gives the first-born male 

Thou canst not claim as Art's reward. 

Is not true greatness, like the poet, born? 

Nobility of pedigree 

May well by birthright look on thee 
With half a dozen centuries of scorn. 

Where are thy old manorial parks and halls, 

A king's gift to a courtier's smile, 

Or loot of French braves when the Isle 

Was theirs and Englishmen were churls and thralls ? 
12 



178 MY LORD. 

Where is the half-mile's length of corridor 
Lined each side with thy pictured row 
Of ancestors, whose grand airs show 

The highness born above the need to soar? 

With none of these beginnings, dost thou dare 
To ape the greatness of the great ? 
Can Genius ancestors create — 

Make old halls of its castles-in-the-air ? 

Genius may work its miracles with time — 
* May make past present and forelive 

The future ; but it cannot give 
Blood-heirship of antiquity sublime. 

But shall Caste's colorless anachronism 
Change to the rainbow's living hues 
And glory to thy sons diffuse 

By being passed through thy poetic prism? 

Pity the son with intellect too numb 

To see that thy one natal word 

Surnames him over all absurd 
Tinsel of titles known to Christendom! 



A BIRD'S AUTUMN LYRIC. 179 



A BIRD'S AUTUMN LYRIC. 

Out of south flew up together 

She and I ; 
Moods of love like April weather 

Made our sky; 
May in egg and June in feather, 

Such of fashion 

Grew our passion, 
Till the summer filled with singing 
And with heavenly-blissful winging, 
And our. oneness dreamed not whether 

I were she or she were I. 

Robed she russet to my golden, 

And for song 
She to me was all beholden ; 

Mornings long 
She would muse me in the olden 

Treetop's twilight, 

And I fly, light, 
Spring and flash, 'dart back and flitter, 
Coo and call, till her sweet twitter 
Would my ecstasy embolden 

To a burst and rush of song. 



180 A BIRD'S AUTUMN LYRIC. 

But of new love with her breast full 

Then she yearned 
Melancholy and unrestful ; 

And she spurned, 
Though I sang the east and west full, 

All my duty, 

All my beauty — 
Of my plumage all the flower, 
Of my piping all the power : 
Toward the lately brooded nestful 

All her being backward turned. 

Now we mope through autumn waning, 

She and I, 
Nor in shining nor in raining 

Trill or cry 
Each to other ever deigning 

Of the olden 

Passion golden 
With the south and April weather ; 
Yet we mate and wait together 
Till, from pining and from plaining, 

Vanish sunward she and I. 



THE SHIBBOLETH. 181 



THE SHIBBOLETH. 

Written by invitation of the Western Association of 

Writers for reading in their Convention at 

Warsaw, Indiana, July 10, 1889. 

The gods are all dead — glory be to God! 

Though still they ghost it in old words, as Pan, 
Apollo, Jove, the Numen (or the Nod), 

That cast thin shadows in the thought of man, 
Yet they themselves have toppled from their hight 

Olympian and fallen back to clod. 
Science has exorcised them with its light; 

Religion banished them from fane and shrine: 
Only in Poesy they haunt the night, 

Pale reminiscences of life divine. 

Now that the Christ has come, inonoclast 

Of old religions, now that Science flings 
Its dawn-flame on the darkness of the past, 

And fetches into sun the truth of things, 
Why is it that Imagination moons? 

Why is it Poesy still sits and sings 
The babe-songs of old fairyland and croons 

Her mother-melodies of ignorance, 



132 THE SHIBBOLETH. 

Her Indian mimicries of Finnish runes, 
Her Holy Grails, her Arthurs of romance? 



Why with Endymion still fondly mope. 

Shaping Love's Lady out of moonshine — why, 
Unless our Poesy is past all hope 

And pining with the Muses Nine to die? 
The Xine are every one already dead ; 

It is their airy ghosts that linger nigh ; 
They all, with god Apollo at their head. 

They all would not be air enough to blow 
The sail of Chambered Nautilus aspread 

And push it over Prose's undertow. 



It seems not strange that our new world of Fact 

Should look on Verse as an anachronism — 
A stopping of the white light to refract 

Its rays to colors through old Fancy's prism — 
Nay, juggling with the light, in darkened rooms, 

By Fancy's worn-out tricks of spiritism. 
While lived the gods the words of Song were 
blooms 

Upon the tree of life ; but such words now 
Are withered garlands on the dead gods' tombs, 

Dry wreaths around a marble Muse's brow. 



THE SHIBBOLETH. 183 

Our Poesy is like that Gadarene 

Of old who roamed among the tombs, and raved, 
And gashed himself with stones, and cried his 
threne 

To the sane Jesus, who rebuked and saved. 
She, too, has come from out the burial-place, 

With night-voice by Minerva's owl depraved, 
To meet the Wonder- Worker face to face 

And wait for Legion out of her to pass : 
As they relinquish her from their embrace 

They rend her garments into Leaves of Grass. 

The Wonder- Worker is our living truth — 

Truth of today, the knowledge of our age ; 
This shall restore old Poesy to youth, 

And bring her back to reason from her rage. 
She shall look round herself and shall behold 

Religion, Story, Science on the stage 
Of the new Learning's language, and grow bold 

To take her role with them and act her part ; 
Chief part, as in her glorious days of old, 

When she led nature captive to her art. 

Yes, Poesy must play first character, 
Must queen it in this drama of the world, 

Or else her singing-robes be stripped from her 
And she be in the ballet frocked and girled — 



184 THE SHIBBOLETH. 

Her voice of goddess in the chorus drowned, 
Her gait of goddess capered, toed, and twirled. 

Shall she be second? Where is first, then, found? 
In Music? Music is her serving-maid. 

In Eloquence? When Eloquence is crowned 
He stands in her lent mantle of flame arrayed. 



Painting and Sculpture rival for her hand; 

She is their sweetheart and their sovran. Yea, 
All arts concenter on her, as a band 

Of damsels ringed around a Queen of May. 
Yet she must wane away as moon no more, 

But orient herself and dawn as day. 
The gods that she has practiced to adore, 

The liturgies employed to worship them, 
The rhetoric defunct of fairy lore, 

Belong not to her New Jerusalem. 



In this New City come down out of heaven, 
And given her to reign in if she will, 

No pagan deities, as on the seven 
World-topping hills of Rome, the temples fill ; 

No satyrs, fauns, or nymphs there are to name 
And designate to wood, and vale, and hill ; 



THE SHIBBOLETH. 185 

It is old Nature newly searched with flame, 
Discovered newly by exploring mind — 

The truth of things, the truth of words that aim 
The fine realities of things to find. 

Words are her kingdom ; Poetry is words ; 

Words aptly chosen by their aptest sense, 
But natural as babblement of birds; 

Words that are music, painting, eloquence ; 
That are keen light from out a core of fire, 

And are of things not seen soul's evidence; 
That star the darkness of sublime desire 

With hintings of the somewhere-shining sun, 

And chime our still thoughts like the morning- 
choir 

That sang together o'er creation done. 

But Poesy must keep within the law; 

Her power of miracles is obsolete ; 
Plans of creation she anew must draw; 

Her miscreations she can ne'er complete; 
Muse, Goddess, Triton, Siren, Fairy, Troll, 

Each a stark mummy in its winding-sheet, 
She never shall re-word with life and soul. 

These are the names of fossils that belong 
To mind of other epochs, and the whole 

Potence of life is gone from them in Song. 



186 THE SHIBBOLETH. 

No ! Song must throb in words of living speech ; 

Must think the living thoughts of living men; 
Must learn of living love what love can teach, 

And fire the world with living hope again; 
Descend from ether to the atmosphere 

And breathe afresh the common oxygen. 
Then wits no more shall query, with a sneer, 

How long may Poesy live after death. 
She shall be known then, when she does appear, 

By this : She will not speak the Shibboleth. 



THRENODY. 187 



THRENODY. 

A gap is in our fireside-ring 
The wideness of a tiny tomb ; 

A prattle sweet as birds can sing 
Has left its hush in every room. 



Our hearts long for the pretty charms 
Of babish questions manifold, 

And for the little hugging arms 
Now locked across a bosom cold. 



The bright hair and the eyes that beamed 
So wondrously, O how we miss ! 

And, O the loving lips ! that seemed 
Fashioned so purposely to kiss. 



As they who, yearning over sea, 
Grow homesick for their land and kin, 

So we grow heaven-sick to be 
In that far land our love is in. 



188 VIC TRICE. 



VICTRICE. 

We walked where the grass was a checker 

Of the light and the leaves of May, 
When the Night in her white shroud of moonshine 

Was the beautiful ghost of Day. 



The presence that thrilled me with passion, 
There under the moon and the shade, 

Was a fond being, meek in her beauty, 
Half seraph and half loving maid. 



Her voice had the sorrowful cadence 
Of winds of the night in the pine ; 

And her soul, like the mild moon of heaven, 
Shone forth from her sad eyes to mine. 

We had come unto where the world ended ; 

For out of the being of men 
And into the bliss of angels 

We had died and were born again. 



VICTRICE. 189 

Deep we drank of Love's river Lethean, 
Till the moon in the west grew white 

And along the gray shore of morning 
Broke the first purple billows of light. 



As the inswelling floodtide of sunrise 
Rose over pale Lucifer's gleam, 

She saw in the drowned star the symbol 
Of the end of our earthly dream. 

She knew — and, O God! to remember 
How she told me this with her eyes! — 

That she never again should behold me 
Till she met my soul in the skies. 

O the pain and the passion of parting! 

For she knew that I needs must go, 
Nor return till the year were dying 

And she lying under the snow. 



O the pang and the anguish of parting! 

When she saw, and I could not see, 
Saw the saraphim signaling to her, 

And her woman's-love hid it from me. 



190 VIC TRICE. 

She loved me too dearly to slay me 
With the tidings her heart had heard; 

And sadly she blessed me and kissed me, 
But said me no saddening word. 



Sainted martyr of passion and victrice ! 

How to memory now thou showst, 
In love like the dying Redeemer, 

In peace like the Holy Ghost! 

Didst thou hope I could bear it the better, 
Not to see thy beauty decline — 

Not to have the gall and the wormwood 
Of memory mixed with the wine? 

Bear it better ! sweet sister of Jesus ! 

When the sorrow of all the race, 
The sorrow of loving and dying, 

I remember was in thy face ! 



O the shock and the fever of madness! 

When my soul, into darkness withdrawn, 
Felt only those eyes in the moonlight, 

Saw onlv that face in the dawn ! 



VICTRICE. 191 

But I came back to life and endured it; 

I said, I will bear my breath : 
Surely, I should bear love and remembrance, 

Since she has borne love and death. 



192 IX OBEROX 



IX OBEROX. 



FRAGMENTS. 

Conceive that hemisphere of Oberon, 
Which is. as our own moon's, forever held 
Faced to its planet by coincidence 
Of motion axial with sidereal. 
And that stupendous globe of Uranus, 
Full seventy bulks of our earth massed in one 
As viewed at distance of her satellite. 
Hanging eternally in middle heaven. 
And with its disk usurping half the sky. 
The mighty orb looked neither sun nor moon ; 
But it is both : and with its light and heat, 
Still saved within it since it was rolled off 
From the expansed primeval solar fire. 
It makes perpetual day, outsplendoring augnt 
Seen, thought, or dreamed of tropic clime serene 
In paradises of Pacific isles. 
The great sphere bloomed in redness like a rose. 
And from it to horizon down, the sky 
Glowed as the sunsets Krakatoa once 



IN OBERON. 193 

Poured round and round our globe. The atmos- 
phere 

Was as if melted ruby, and the breath of it 

Was like the thrilling taste of rare old wine. 



Speech has the same use there that song has 
here ; 
It is a harp that sifts the airy thought; 
Sweet speech, with no more reason there for being 
Than verse has when it lilts through Kubla Khan 
And fetches over into song divine 
Far echoes of the meaning of a dream. 



Zoe was first to speak. No rare old violin, 
With melody memorized in all its wood, 
Singing its soul out in a master's hands — 
No vox-humana of an organ-pipe 
Sobbed solo down a great cathedral-aisle, 
Lauding the Mother and the Son of God, 
Could hint that marvelous voice to human sense ; 
Though it was low, it seemed to fill the world. 

13 



194 AY OBERON. 



ZOE. 



My Zoen! Spirit of the Earth in thee! 
Hast thou not now with me new interest 
In that far world where thou and I have lived. 
And have friends, kindred,, and life's tender ties? 
It seemed, when we were there in human flesh, 
That births to misery and deaths in sin ; 
Pathetic suffrance under tragic wrong; 
Meek innocence upon the shameful cross ; 
Red glut of murder on the battlefield ; 
Crusading slaughter in the name of Christ, 
His footsteps bloodied from the sacred ground 
Under fierce Islam's banner of the moon ; 
The game of lions played with mangled limbs 
Of Christian girls to sport the bloody shes 
Who mothered heroes in old pagan Rome ; 
The hells of martyrdom (the hells on earth 
To propagate the faith that Hell awaits 
Beyond) ; man's brutal bondage, making brutes 
Of slave and master both ; the servitude 
Of toil to syndicates of robbery ; 
The deadly competitions of grim want 
With fatted greed ; the littered swarms 
Of population, heirs of lust and crime, 
Squandered in famine, pestilence, and war — 



IN OBERON. 195 

It seemed to us that such enormities 
Of sorrow, sin, disease, and cruel death 
Were heritages of a primal curse, 
Foul stains upon the nature of the world, 
And that the hope of an escape therefrom 
By being pardoned into Paradise 
Was all the solace that remained to man. 
But here, my Zoen, we have clearer light. 
We see no foredesign of special fate 
For any world, no supernatural scheme 
For singling one world from the universe 
Of worlds to damn it wholly at the first 
And save it partly afterward. 

ZOEN. 

No, love; 
As we remember through to origin 
The course of life in our world Oberon, 
We recognize the Omnipresent Mind 
(We know not what it is, for, as mere parts 
Thereof, we can not comprehend the whole, 
But of it only dream and name it God) 
Thinking in terms of matter — chaos first, 
Then lumps of worlds, instinct with energies 
And potencies, from which spring forms of life, 



196 IN OBERON. 

Which are God's forms of thought; low forms at 
start, 

But growing higher, as the Thinking grows 

In clearness, till at length the highest forms 

Take memory of all their own world's past, 

Take all that world's life into consciousness, 

To make it God's complete idea there. 

ZOE. 

How, then, do we explain the evil of the 
Earth- 
Such evil as we know we have outgrown 
In Oberon — if God is conscious good? 

ZOEN. 

We argue from a premise undefined 
And predicate of what we do not know 
When we essay to deal with attributes 
That faith ascribes to God. Omnipotence, 
Omniscience, and Benevolence Divine 
Assembled in a Person are not God. 
What is omnipotence but all the powers 
Of all the universe together summed? 
What is omniscience but the total mind 
Evolved to consciousness in all degrees 
On all the peopled worlds flocked round the suns? 



IN OBERON. 197 

And is not that divine benevolence 
Which, blocking out the globes from chaos, builds, 
Through forces ever feeling toward the good, 
Worlds orderly and beautiful as this? 



ZOE. 



There are in Earth who reason that, if God 
Created matter and if evil comes 
From this, then evil has its origin 
In him as its first cause. Discourse of that. 

ZOEN. 

We know as little as they know on Earth 
What matter in itself or what God is; 
But this we know, that neither they nor we 
Have faculties to fancy or to dream, 
Much less to think, that something has begun 
From nothing or in nothing can have end. 
Matter's beginning is unthinkable; 
And, since we cannot think it, matter has, 
For our mind, no beginning ; matter is, 
As God is, uncreated and eternal. 
What we term evil, then, is foreordained 
No more than cosmic gravitation is. 
We see the force which holds the worlds together 



198 IN OBERON. 

Seize him who topples from a tower's hight 

And hurtle him to death against the ground. 

Would we annul the law of gravity 

And let star-systems tumble all apart 

To save from downfall that small mass of life ? 

No less is gravity a part of God 

Than is benevolence. Almighty power 

Must function through its organs — can not make 

Its gravitation merciful to sin 

Or pitiful to pain. 

«. 

ZOE. 

What, then, is sin, 
That it estops divine benevolence, 
And that omnipotence must arm itself 
Against it with the vengeful sword of pain? 

ZOEN. 

Sin is the struggle of the partial wills 
Of matter with the Universal Will 
Of Mind — the nature (Spirit to be born) 
Of things contending to possess themselves 
Of the estate of life and living soul. 
Sin educates. Sin teaches mind the laws 
Of matter by the test of penalties. 



IN OBERON. 199 

Hence every sin is sworded round with pain. 
We can not reason wherefore pain should be ; 
But can we wherefore pleasure should? On Earth 
The lands and seas are populous with lives 
Devouring one another for their food; 
And pain of life devoured must be, no less 
Than pleasure of the life devouring is, 
An incident of progress into higher life; 
Wherein, as here, we recollect the twain 
As warp and woof of finished web of bliss. 



ZOE. 



But shall the life of Earth develop there, 
Evolving evil out, evolving death, 
Till mankind take, as we of Oberon, 
A common consciousness of all their world, 
Inherit memory of all its dead, 
And live them over in immortal youth? 

ZOEN. 

However much we of the past may know, 
We can but hope the future. Worlds there are, 
Doubtless, that fail of consummation's flower, 
As earth's dead moon, whose life is gathered up, 
Or shall be, in remembrance otherwhere; 



200 IN OBERON. 

But earth's conditions promise permanence 

To her warm zone for millions of her years ; 

And there, I doubt not, shall the race of man 

Ascend to altitudes of being, dreams 

Of mortal would not dare to prophesy. 

Though it can never have as high a form 

As evolution has created here 

(Earth's greater gravity forbade the wings), 

Yet it shall so complete the form it has, 

So by invention aid and supplement, 

That it shall master all the elements 

And dominate the forces of the world. 

If light and heat endure upon that planet 

Till time has brought fulfillment of the laws 

Of fit survival and heredity 

Of apt selection — apter ruled by thought — 

Man shall no longer pine for future Heaven, 

But live more heaven than all his past has dreamed. 

ZOE. 

Yet, O ! the long, long ages it will need 
To breed the tiger out of human life, 
To slack the poison-serpent's wicked coil, 
The grapple of the hideous devil-fish, 
The mobbing rush of wolfish ravinings ! 
O peaceful lands to bleed with havoc yet ! 



IN OBERON. 201 

O seas to smoke with battle's thunder-guns ! 

O women ! who shall wail the centuries full 

Of curses on the scrofulous Blue Blood 

Whose armed insaneness and ensoldiered hate 

Shall still disman and desolate your homes. 

The willing laborer shall hunt for toil 

While his wan wife and puny children wait 

In famine for his wage. The carpenter 

Of Nazareth shall still be put to shame 

By Christian Dives spurning from his door 

The Jesus-blessed, or delivering them 

To Christian jails for guilt of going hungry. 

Love's wrecks of chastity shall walk the streets 

By night — God ! O just God ! hast thou no whip 

Of lightning, zigzag with almighty wrath, 

To lash these brute wrongs headlong down to hell ? 

ZOEN. 

This is access of human passion. Think 
No longer now of Earth's diseases ; think 
Now only of the splendid bloom of life 
That is to issue from the sodden saps 
Of sin which ooze up from we know not where, 
And grow from darkness and blow into day. 
We have not searched the secrets of the night, 
But we do know the signs of dawn. We know, 



202 IN OBERON. 

From conscious history of Oberon, 

Brought through all glooms yen Earth is passing 
through, 

That life is rising to its morning there. 

Science is catching up the light of it 

Along her warming mountain-tops of snow ; 

Its glow creeps down the slopes ; begins to flush 

The fogs and stirring shadows of the vales. 

Commerce shall flock the waters with the wings 

Of sailing Peace — the steel-mailed hulks of War 

Oozed in among old bones of Viking-ships 

At the dead bottom of unsounded seas. 

Carousing hurricanes that madly dance 

The ocean-floors shall be controlled to sane 

Tame powers pushing in obedience 

To navigation, and the skill of man 

Shall take the wild waves by their tossing manes 

And stroke them into gentle servitors 

To bear him dangerless from shore to shore. 

So merchandry shall freely ebb and flow 

About the globe and mix together minds, 

And languages, and races, till, at last, 

One race, one language, one consense of mind, 

Shall integrate humanity. The weight 

Of that dense planet pulling from the sun 

Makes problems of aerial waftage hard — 

Too hard for evolution to have solved 



IN OBERON. 203 

For highest life — yet sometime intellect 
Shall work the miracle, ingrafting wings 
Upon dead matter, breathing into it 
Force as a living soul, and riding it, 
As if an emmet on an eagle's back, 
Along the lofty highways of the winds. 
The energies of nature, heat, and light, 
And electricity (or what names else — 
They all are one), born servants to the force 
Named life, shall be enskilled to do its work, 
Lifting all burdens from the neck of toil, 
As here, and leaving mind, the master, time 

To star itself amid sky-silences, 

To prick the canopy of mystery through 

And sift-down glory from the upper flame. 



204 ISLE-OF-WILLOWS. 



ISLE-OF-WILLOWS. 

A little bird with a scarlet coat 
Came fluting to me a silvery note, 
As though it said through its mellow throat, 
Isle-of- Willows ! Isle-of- Willows ! 

It perched alone on a lonely tree, 
And seemed that it longed and longed to be 
In the isle it sung of thus to me, 
Isle-of- Willows ! Isle-of- Willows ! 

It thought perhaps of a little isl£ 
Where blue the waters and heavens smile 
And green the willows wave all the while — 
Isle-of- Willows ! Isle-of- Willows ! 

Is this thy memory or thy hope — 
Thy being's backward or forward scope, 
Whereto thy little heart-longings grope? — 
Isle-of- Willows ! Isle-of-Willows ! 

It said me never another word, 
But flitted away, this little bird; 
Yet aye in my soul its voice is heard — 
Isle-of-Willows ! Isle-of-Willows ! 



THE AMERICAN CITIZEN. 205 



THE AMERICAN CITIZEN. 

No scutcheon I have to be blazoned by, 
No von or de for a family-tie 

To a pomp of grandfathers eight or ten; 
I was not born in the purple, but I 

Am a born American Citizen. 

No lordship incarnates itself in me 
Through blood newly blued by a royal decree 

Or filtered of old from a prince of men, 
But an honor I boast of higher degree — 

I am an American Citizen. 

Nobility out of the veins of the dead 
Belongs to the past; the present, instead, 

Makej manhood the measure of man again, 
And chooses blood that is livingly red 

To make the American Citizen. 

As once it was in the glorious day 

When Rome was queen of the world in her sway, 

Romanus sum was the proudest claim then, 
So in that old Roman spirit I say, 

I am an American Citizen. 



206 THE AMERICAN CITIZEN. 

The pride of the Great Republic I bear; 
I feel her majesty move in the air, 

Her greatness to come and her glory when 
A thousand million of freemen shall share 

The name of American Citizen. 



Behold her ruling the world of the West, 
Her rule of the most the rule of the best, 

When the brave man's voice, and the true man's 
pen, 
And the free man's vote have wholly possessed 

The future American Citizen. 



I pray that her strength and grandeur increase 
To tutor the world in the ways of peace, 

Till the lamb shall lie in the lion's den 
And the wars of Kings at the bidding cease 

Of the strong American Citizen. 



O, I hail her flag with the stars bedight, 
I see her power for freedom and right, 

I thrill with her power beyond my ken, 
As I feel that the coming man in his might 

Shall be the American Citizen. 



MADONNA. 207 



MADONNA. 

Hail, O Madonna! my woman, my lady! 

Mine by my poesy, mine by my dreams ! 
Not as a nymph of the leafily shady 

Myth of the wilderness, nor as the limbs 
Nude of a naiad in fountains and streams 
Glimpsed as she flashes, and plashes, and swims, 
But as a real live woman, Madonna! 

Future-forefeeling old poets, then seeing 

Nowhere in all the world lady like mine, 
Feigned an ideal aerial being, 

Oread or dryad, that, piped to by Pan, 
Danced in the solitudes, where the divine 
Passion of beauty has visited man 
Always in guise of my woman, Madonna! 

Or the delicious keen charm of illusion 

(Rapturous chase of the soul after sense) 
Fabled they, dreaming the plunge and the fusion 
Into clear waters of womanly shapes; 
Bosoms that hid in the crystal defense, 
Bodies that made hurried bashful escapes 
Into the fountains, revealed thee, Madonna! 



208 MADONNA. 

Thou art the mystery, thou art the beauty, 

Left to the world from the world's age of gold ; 
Thou art the thought holding heroes to duty ; 
Thou art that secret in music and rhyme 
Which has been guessed at, but never been told ; 
Thou art the dreamed-of and longed-for of 
time, 

Glory of womanhood, lady Madonna! 



THE LAND REDEEMED. 209 



THE LAND REDEEMED. 

Not always shall the good earth be 

To man's use under ban ; 
The land shall be redeemed at last 

And rendered back to man; 
Then each shall of the acres hold 

Enough to make him free; 
None shall usurp moit than his need, 

And none shall landless be. 

The system of old feudal wrong 

That makes the people pay 
For room to live upon the earth 

Shall fade and fall away; 
The name of landlord shall become 

A mockery and scoff, 
As rolls the tide of human rights 

To sweep his landmarks off. 

For man shall yet perceive the truth — 
Through old tradition dim — 

That record, scroll, nor parchment writ 
Can take the earth from him ; 

14 



210 THE LAXD REDEEMED. 

That nature makes a title-deed 

To each one for his time 
In his own want, and who takes more 

He perpetrates a crime. 

This living truth shall flush the cheek 

Of pale Starvation red, 
As over old ancestral parks 

The pauper's sheaves are spread; 
This truth shall wrest from blood and birth 

The scepter and the crown, 
And, leveling the Workers up, 

The Drones shall level down. 

Then prince and peasant side by side 

Shall strive, with heart and brain, 
By doing highest work for man 

The highest rank to gain; 
For, when each has his human right 

Of home upon the soil, 
The Worker shall be prince and king — 

God's Nobleman of Toil! 

Glad time of earth's beatitude! 

When none shall hoard or steal, 
But all mankind together work 

For universal weal; 



THE LAND REDEEMED. 211 

When war no more shall shock the land 

Or thunder on the sea, 
But by the Golden Rule of Christ 

All wrongs shall righted be. 



212 DUTY HERE AND GLORY THERE. 



DUTY HERE AND GLORY THERE. 

Darkness that my heart could feel of, 
Blackness that my soul could swim in, 
Drowned in me the living spirit, 

Strength to hope and will to dare; 
Murder-shrieks that shock the midnight, 
And that pierce, and pang, and sicken, 
Would have brought me grateful respite 

From that death, that death despair; 
When a preternatural whisper — 
Words that sounded not, but touched me — 
Seemed to utter through me to me, 

'Duty here and glory there !' 

Where ? My soul looked round and questioned ; 
Boom of thunder-throated cannon, 
Clash of steel, and clang of music 

Strove in vain to answer where. 
Then loud senatorial voices, 
Stormy with a people's passion, 
Swollen with a nation's power, 

Seemed grand answers in the air. 
But the cannon, and the clashing, 



DUTY HERE AND GLORY THERE. 213 

And the music, and the voices 
Never echoed to that whisper, 
'Duty here and glory there !' 

Showers of delicious praises, 
Falling on the panting spirit 
Like the cooling rains of summer, 

Cherishing great souls that bear 
Thought's immortal bloom of beauty 
Wafting round the world the fragrance 
Of their names — Ambition questioned, 

'Worth not these the weary wear, 
Through a lifelong toil and patience, 
Wear of soul and wear of body?' 
No response in that felt whisper, 

'Duty here and glory there!' 

Where? My soul looked up and questioned — 
Up to where the stars were burning 
In the grand and awful temple 

Of the midnight — up to where 
Vision stops against the curtain 
Of the infinite, but spirit 
Puts aside the vail and enters ; 

It is there! O, it is there! 
Thrilled the whisper through my being, 
'Duty here for little lifetimes, 
Glory there for endless ages — 

Duty here and glory there!' 



214 REMEMBER THE MAINE. 



REMEMBER THE MAINE. 

Americans, can you forget our ship Maine ? 
How she went to her grave in the fetid flood, 
A coffin for thirteenscore men of our blood, 

In a dynamite hell of murder by Spain ? 

No ! remember the Maine and — remember Spain ! 

We forget not her history's bloody stain 

On the map of the world, her wars west and east, 
Her sign of the Cross always mark of the Beast ; 
But we have an affair of our own with Spain : 
We remember the Maine and — remember Spain ! 

Two hundred and sixtysix men of the Maine 
Done to death in their sleep is an 'incident' 
For diplomacy, is it, Sir President? 

O take not, my People, blood-money from Spain, 
But remember the Maine and — remember Spain ! 

Shall six hundred thousand appeal in vain 

From their graves of starvation in Cuba's Isle, 
While we with palaver and Christianly smile 

Plead for Wall-street peace and the credit of Spain ! 

No ! remember the Maine and — remember Spain ! 



REMEMBER THE MAINE. 215 

The Nation is one, and our duty is plain : 
We owe it to justice, we owe it to law 
Of the nations, the vengeful swift sword to draw 
And wave it for thunder of guns upon Spain — 
To remember the Maine and — remember Spain! 

Let our ships flock forth on the old Spanish Main, 
Let our guns blast her out of her islands here, 
Till her flag's last hold in the hemisphere 
We capture for freedom, for freedom from Spain, 
And remember the Maine on the seas with Spain ! 

April, 1898. 



216 THE THOUGHT AXD THE WORD. 



THE THOUGHT AXD THE WORD. 

My thought is a soaring eagle, 

My word a serpent on the ground : 

The serpent crawls, 

The eagle falls 
Swifter than sight or sound. 

A grapple of steely talons, 

A grip of coiling fetters round ; 
And up the skies 
The eagle flies, 
Eagle with serpent bound. 

A fight in the open heaven, 

And round and downward settling slow 
The strong bird sinks — 
With snaky links 
Throttled to death below. 

A curse on the strangling serpent! 
O that my eagle did but know 
How down to stoop 
And with one swoop 
Finish him at a blow ! 



LOVE IN THE SUGAR-CAMP. 217 



LOVE IN THE SUGAR-CAMP. 

What sweeter of the sweets of youth — 
Of youth abloom and springtime sunny — 

Than love's night in the sugar-booth 
Round kettles of the maple honey? 

All day the live trees have distilled 
From thawy mold their luscious juices, 

And all day down the spiles has rilled 
The nectar from the barky sluices. 

The grove's run, twice collected in, 
Has kept all day the caldrons fuming, 

And now their winy foams begin 
To sirup into golden spuming. 

Swains come with sweethearts from the farms- 
The farm's young men and maidens pairing — 

Along lone paths, where moonrise charms 
Their steps to linger, hither faring. 

As flock the couples to the glow, 
Just where the shine with shadow closes 

Hearts peep from eyes and blushes blow 
Out of the dark like morning roses. 



218 LOVE IN THE SUGAR-CAMP. 

All one another greet by name 
(There are no Misters and no Misses), 

And girls touch boyish lips with flame 
By proxy of their mutual kisses. 

They sing old songs, they play old plays, 
They run the revels of old dances, 

And make the hours between the days 
Realities of old romances. 

And now they huddle to the board 
(The dear so near that pulses quicken), 

Where into earthen trays is poured 
The bubbling mell to cool and thicken. 

The damsels knead the waxen cakes, 
And shape them for the banquet handy, 

And that night many a fond pair makes 
The tie that binds of ropes of candy. 

O cheeks of roses, hair of flax, 
And eyes like heaven in April weather, 

My dream still tastes that maple wax 
And that sweet love of you together. 



LOVE IN THE SUGAR-CAMP. 219 

Ah ! rarer than the work of bees, 
Ah ! finer than love's later fashion, 

The sweetness from the sugar-trees, 
The sweetness of the heart's first passion ! 



220 ASPIRATION AND INSPIRATION 



ASPIRATION AND INSPIRATION. 

We weary waiting for these glimmerings 
Which struggle singly through the difficult rifts 
Of aspiration from the overworld. 
O for some breezy circumstance at once 
To take the cloud off from our starry thoughts 
And let their glory constellate the dark ! 
The spirit's brightest outgrowths are of pain, 
As precious pearls are of disease in shells 
At bottom of the deep. The slow, obscure, 
Still process of the rain, distilling down 
The great sweat of the sea, is never seen 
In the consummate spectacle flashed forth 
A seven-hued arch upon the clouds of heaven : 
So never sees the world those energies, 
Stern effort and long patience, which have stirred 
In toil's humility and slowly heaved 
Its darkness up, till sudden glory springs 
Forth on it, showing like the spanning rainbow. 

Think ye the lofty foreheads of the world, 
Which shine as full moons through the night of 
time, 



ASPIRATION AND INSPIRATION. 221 

Holding their calm big splendor steadily 

Forever at the top of history, 

Think ye they rushed up with the suddenness 

Of rockets aimlessly shot into heaven, 

And flared to their eternal places there ? 

The vulgar years through which ambition gropes, 

Reaching and feeling for its destiny, 

Are only years of chaos, tallied not 

On the memorial rocks, but covered deep 

Under the stratified history of a world. 

Celebrity by some great accident, 
Some single opportunity, is like 
Aladdin's palace in the Arabian tale, 
Vanished when envy steals the wizard's charm. 
But thought up-pyramids itself to fame 
By husbandry of opportunities, 
Grade upon grade constructing, till its hight, 
Descried above time's far horizon, slopes 
With peak among the stars. Go mummify 
Thy name within that architectural pile 
Another's intellect has builded ; none — 
For all the hieroglyphs of glory-*-none 
Save but the builder's name shall signify 
To the remembering ages. 

Heart and brain 
Of thine need resolutely yoke themselves 



222 ASPIRATION AND INSPIRATION. 

To slow-paced years of toil — need feel and think 

(A bibulous memory sponging up the thoughts 

Of dead men is not thought) — else all the trumps 

Of hero-heraldry that ever twanged, 

Gathered in one mad blare above the graves, 

Shall not avail to resurrect thy name 

To the salvation of remembrance then 

When once the letters of it have slunk back 

Into the alphabet from off thy tomb. 

Ay, think or perish ! Marble frets and crumbles 

Down into undistinguishable dust 

At last, and epitaphs grooved into brass 

Yield piecemeal to the hungry elements ; 

But thoughts that drop plumb to the depths of truth 

Anchor the name forever and forever. 



INNERVALE. 223 



INNERVALE. 

At the base of a marvelous mountain, 
Whose hights human foot never trod, 

There gushes a crystalline fountain 
And makes a bright brook in the sod. 



And the sod greens away o'er a valley 
That opens where blue waters be ; 

And the brook with meandering dally 
Goes babbling along to the sea. 



There, snowy sails pass like the lazy 
White clouds of a summer-blue sky — 

Appear and evanish where hazy 
Infinity fences the eye. 



Here, asleep upon Pan's mossy pillows — 
By Pan piped asleep in these groves, — 

Dreaming Poesy hears the low billows 
Breeze-babbled from echoing coves. 



224 IXXERVALE. 

And here, while the leaves sift the sunny 
Swift sands of the day from above, 

The wild-bee gads hunting for honey, 
With wings wove of whispers of love. 

Here the ripples make music like olden 
Weird monotones thrummed on a lute : 

Here the dark skies of green are starred golden 
With thick constellations of fruit. 



In this valley, alone but not lonely, 

Beside where the brook-waters run, 
Stands one little cottage, one only, 

Dwells one little maid, only one. 

Her blue eyes are clear pools of passion, 

Her lips have the tremor of leaves, 
And the speech that her loving thoughts fashion 

Is sweeter than poetry weaves. 

Though the vale is by sleep so surrounded 

That her ne'er a wooer shall win, 
On the side by the sea of dreams bounded 

With her I sail out and sail in. 



SHIPS COMING IN. 225 



^ 



SHIPS COMING IN. 

I lay upon a rock that jutted to the sea. 

Twilight came down from out the pine-woods back. 

of me, 
And, stealing .on the waters, met the sudden moon, 
Rushed into her kiss, and sank to a dead white 

swoon. 
I lay there on the rock and thought of all had been, 
I lay and watched my ships come in, my ships come 

in. 

Sail, O ships ! my home- voyaging ships ! 
Sail from the sunlit side of the world ; 
Climb the watery bulge of the globe ; 
Pass the line where the orient dips 
In the sea, and, with canvas unfurled, 
Take yon moon's glory on as a robe : 
From wherever your sailing has been, 
Sail, ships, hither, sail hither, sail in. 

Ship ! that flew out of port with thy wings 
Dipt in morning, is yon phantom thou — 
Moonlit phantom that drifts to the strand 
And no freight and no passenger brings? 

15 



226 SHIPS COMIXG IX. 

Yet see ! one there alive on the prow, 
In his gaze the sick hunger for land: 
Hope ! my Captain ! t ha: sailed out to win 
AD our world — conquered Captain, sail in. 



Ship ! that pushed to the tropical zone. 
Touched spice-islands in summery seas. 

Then, in mad equatorial gales. 
Went adrift with one mariner lone — 
• Bring him back from the sunned Caribbees. 

Bring him in with thy storm-tattered sails 
Love! my Sailor! once life's happy twin, 
Now sweet ghost of life, specter ! sail in. 



Ship! that steered for the boreal stars, 
And. bewitched by the weird northern-lights, 
Cramped through ice-packs and wintered in 
snows 
Heaped to the deck and piled to the spars. 
Thou hast brought from the long arctic nights 
Only one. and him famished and froze ; 
Fame ! my Helmsman ! Anatomy thin 
Propt to the wheel, stark Helmsman, sail in. 



SHIPS COMING IN. 227 

Ship! that went out to traffic with Ind, 

Hugged the Gold Coast, and doubled Good 
Hope, 

When full sail on the Asian sea, 
Thou wast caught by a contrary wind 

And blown down the world's southerly slope 

And thence upward and hither to me : 
Ship, whose lading did never begin, 
With this moonshine for cargo ! sail in. 

Ship ! that searched round the world for new lands, 
Sounded new seas and charted new skies, 
Studied new stars, new sights of the sun, 
Then plowed keel in the ooze and the sands — 
There in shallows thy mystery lies, 

When all the deeps thy sailing has done : 
Psyche wove but the Parcae did spin 
Warp and woof of thy sail sailing in. 

Ship ! that struck the horizon's sea-line 
And there vanished away in the blue, 
Seemed that thy sail went into the sky, 
And not down the east ocean's decline : 
Is naught, then, but the underworld true, 
And yon overworld naught but a lie? 
Faith! my Anchor! all rusted with sin, 
There on deck of this ship sailing in! 



228 ALONE. 



ALONE. 

Alone! alone! 
Forth out of the darkness, 
Back into the darkness, 
We come and we go alone. 

O birth ! O death ! 
Lone cry from the midnight, 
Moan lost in the midnight, 
A catch and a lapse of breath ! 

O youth ! fleet dream ! 
We sleep out of heaven, 
We dream down from heaven, 

Then wake from the fleeting dream. 

No more! no more! 
Youth's gladness of living, 
Love's madness of living, 

Can come back to me no more. 

Those glad, mad years ! 
How, dancing and singing, 
How danced and went winging 
Those passionate choral years ! 



ALONE. 229 



To be ! to live ! 
What being, what living, 
What largess of living 

The blood of the boy can give ! 

O earth ! O heaven ! 
Earth glad with all beauty, 
And no hint of duty 

From all the glad blue of heaven ! 

Sun, moon, and stars! 
Lakes, woods with birds flying 
Through them, and the crying 
Of insects beneath the stars ! 



Then life in love! 
Life's torrent-stream steadied, 
Stopt, flowed back, and eddied 
About in the pool of love. 



From boy to man ! 
Bridge built of a rainbow — 
Love's luminous rainbow, 

Which fadeth from boy to man. 



230 ALONE. 

Love's fading bow ! 
Still following hither, 
I follow on whither 

It lures me and I must go. 

Yes, follow on ! 
Love's rainbow-ideal, 
So nigh and so real, 

Still flies, but I follow on. 

For love is all ! 
Hope, pleasure, ambition, 
Fame's fullest fruition, 

Are nothing ; for love is all. 



But age grows lone ! 
For age is unlovely — 
Age wins not the lovely ; — 
We go as we came, alone. 



Alone! alone! 
Forth out of the darkness, 
Back into the darkness, 
We come and we go alone. 



NEARING THE BRINK. 231 



NEARING THE BRINK. 

Now steady, old heart — we are nearing the brink ! 

Let us front our fate boldly : we can not face back ; 

For the Hours are mad wolves in full chase on our 
track 

From the steppes to the sea, and the moment we 
shrink 

The whole swift tumultuous ravinous pack 

Will scuffle us, hustle us over the brink. 

A minute to think — but a minute ere doom — 

Of the high meadows back in their beauty of 
spring, 

Of the bright brooks aflow and the songbirds 
a-wing, 

Of the blue skies aglow and the green plains 
abloom — 

Now wide wastes of snow to the vision's far ring, 

The pack at our heels, and a minute to doom ! 

One rush, then the plunge and the drop to the sea — 
Hear the surge at the foot of the precipice roar ! 

O ! the leap from the land's-end — to sink or to 
soar ? 



232 NEARIXG THE BRIXK. 

If the quick and the dead shall divide you and me. 

Old heart, we must part as we take the leap o'er. 
I sunward to soar, you to sink in the sea. 



And yet. my old heart, there is no other way. 
All the seasons of joyance are past long ago: 
Spring and summer and autumn are under the 
snow, 

And the hungry horizons, a-swarm for their prey. 
From east, west, and north now are closing in so 

That all there is left us is this only way. 



The Hours, the lean Hours, the keen Hours huddle 
in. 
They have tasted the blood in our tracks on the 

waste. 
And our life is a forfeit to that eager taste : 
Though we halt or go headlong, they win. they will 
win ; 
For we are their prey, if devoured or effaced, 
Their prey or their triumph, as they huddle in. 



The scars of life's mad and sad passions on you, 
Wounded heart, shall be drowned all away in the 
deep ; 



NEARING THE BRINK. 233 

Unto you shall be rest, unto you shall be sleep ; 
But for me — if to wake and, with memory true, 

To take all our past, all your sorrows — the leap ! 
With you, dear old heart, to the darkness with you ! 



THE END. 



NOV 20 1899 






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